Page 136 - The Drucker Lectures

Knowledge Lecture III [ 117

since they’ve learned a topic. And maybe it’s a good idea to go
back and to take out that textbook on cost accounting once again.
They’re becoming rusty.
Finally, there are areas where people will need to acquire
new knowledge and skill. And they’ll need to go back to school.
Here, the rule of who pays is pretty simple: If it’s job-related,
you must reimburse it. And let me say the greatest weakness of
our nonprofit institutions is that they don’t reimburse. They have
tremendous resistance against acquiring additional knowledge
and skill on the part of their people, and it’s stupid. It’s very, very
shortsighted, and it doesn’t save anything. It costs money.
So what do we need? We need emphasis on performance.
We need the ability to close down, whether it is a product that’s
obsolete, a plant that is no longer producing, a business, a divi-
sion, a skill.
Now, in many cases where skills become obsolete, you can
offer people a chance to acquire new skills, but only to a lim-
ited extent. In this mobile society of ours, you don’t do a colloid
chemist any favors by offering him a job when you no longer
need colloidal chemistry. He’s better off going elsewhere. And
we need that freedom to let people go as the business dictates
and the technology dictates.
Beginning in the 1930s, the American unions made the job
into a property right. And now we see that as a major reason for
our lack of competitiveness. It’s even worse in Europe. But you
know why we have those union rules? Very largely because man-
agements did not realize what was needed.
And if we don’t put into our policies the right protection of
jobs against arbitrary management action, we will eventually—
either through the unions or through the courts—be hit with
the wrong ones. The danger of being put into straitjackets, with
the equivalent of faculty tenure or union rules or job restrictions,
is so very great that this is not the time for management to wait