Page 142 - The Drucker Lectures

Knowledge Lecture IV [ 123

beyond the Danish language area much. The assumption is not
that every place is your market but, rather, that every place is
your competitor.
Another thing that you will see increasingly over the next
12 years is partnerships. And so you will have to learn to work
with people who are not your employees but who are also not
outsiders—you know, like the nice North Carolina phrase “kiss-
ing kin.” And this is going to be a very great challenge. It means,
above all, that you have to be much clearer in your objectives,
your policies, and your strategy because you can’t just change
rapidly. You can’t order people and say, “You’ll do this or else
you’ll walk the plank.” And this means that five years before you
do something you’ll have to think it through, because it will take
you that long to persuade people.
Most of us still think that when we talk of personnel rela-
tions, we talk of rank and file. That’s not going to be where
the problems are. When you eliminate levels of management,
you demote managers. You may pay them more; you may give
them wonderful titles such as “senior associate.” But nobody is
fooled by that. And the less power people have, the more they
lay claim to it. And so the resistance will be incredible. Those
MBAs come in with the wrong expectations today. They expect
to be managers, but they aren’t going to be. They are going to
be specialists—very well paid, but not managers, because there
aren’t going to be that many management positions. And so they
will feel betrayed, and it’s already beginning.
The American automobile industry has tried very hard in the
last few years to bring in cooperation with the union rank and
file, and everybody expected tremendous resistance on the plant
floor. In fact, there has been virtually none. Instead, the resis-
tance has come from the supervisors and from the union gen-
eral stewards. Suddenly, the personnel people in the automobile
companies must concentrate not on the rank and file but on the