Page 141 - The Drucker Lectures

122 [ The Drucker Lectures

great majority will be clerks or clerk supervisors, and for them, a
long commute into the city is simply too arduous. Wherever they
can, these people look for jobs close to where they live rather
than spending two hours stuck on the freeway trying to get to
Los Angeles. And that alone will speed up the trend toward
contracting out, because to supervise these people, to train them,
will require an employer out here in the Pomona Valley [east of
downtown Los Angeles] that has critical mass. And that means
somebody who has multiple clients and is therefore an indepen-
dent contractor.
Another thing to say is that 12 years out, even a fairly small
business—and perhaps a great many nonbusinesses, too—will
have to be managed in contemplation of a world economy. I’m
pretty careful in my choice of words. I didn’t say, “It will have to
be in the world economy.” That’s very fashionable to say today,
and it’s silly. Most businesses, the overwhelming majority, will
not be in the world economy, actively.
If you are a textile manufacturer in Denmark, you have to
buy your cotton outside of Denmark. But that doesn’t mean that
you are in the world economy; it means that you buy a com-
modity. And if you buy spinning machinery, you buy it in Swit-
zerland because that’s where the best textile machinery comes
from. But, again, you are not in the world economy. You sell your
goods probably only in Denmark, and maybe you export a little
bit just south of the border into Northern Germany. But that’s
it. Your market is pretty local, within 100 kilometers, two hours
by car, and that’s very typical. And that’s not going to change
that much. And yet that Danish cotton textile manufacturer not
only reads the cotton market commodity prices every day very
carefully but he also pays attention to what goes on in the tex-
tile industry all over the world—or he won’t last long. He has
to manage in contemplation of the world economy even though
his market is pretty much a local one and probably doesn’t go