Page 128 - The Drucker Lectures

Knowledge Lecture II [ 109

porary. And so how do you do it? A good many companies have
learned that it isn’t enough to have a research director who is a
whiz in a certain specialty. You need a technologist who has an
awareness of what goes on in other areas. And this is not some-
thing we yet know how to do systematically, but it’s something
we will have to learn.
The last thing to say is that this is work and not good inten-
tions. It’s got to be measured. And yet whenever I use that word,
people get upset, and they say, “What we do can’t be measured.”
I don’t think I’ve told you the story of how I got into the
management of research. We had just moved from New Eng-
land to New York, and I was teaching management at NYU.
And I had a neighbor who was research director of one of the
large pharmaceutical companies, and we discovered that he and
I were both enthusiastic but equally incompetent chess players.
Nobody wanted to play with us, and so we played together. And
one day I came home, and there was this fellow in a great state
of agitation. He had waited for me. And I said, “What’s the
matter, Stanley?” He was always very quiet. And he said, “You
know, I’ve always been complaining to you how totally disor-
ganized our company is, and how we need management. And
then I told you about the new president of ours who came in six
weeks ago, and how delighted I was with him because he was
going to actually start managing the place. Well, he called me
in today and said, ‘Stanley, I’ve accepted your proposal, and I’ll
appoint a budget committee, and everybody will have a budget.’
And I said, ‘Wonderful!’ And he said, ‘Stanley, you’re going to
be chairman of this committee.’ And I said, ‘Wonderful!’ And
he said, ‘The first budget I want, Stanley, is that of the research
department.’ And I said, ‘Mr. President, what we do in research
isn’t determined by us, but by what a lot of rats and guinea pigs
and white mice and hamsters do when we put substances under
their skin or push them down their gullet.’ And he said, ‘If that