Page 143 - The Drucker Lectures

124 [ The Drucker Lectures

union management people and their own foremen. You will see
more and more of this, and it and will strengthen the personnel
function, for better or worse.
And finally, in 10 or 15 years we will have been forced to
tackle the basic problem of the legitimacy and accountabil-
ity of management. Whenever the organization of production
changes—and I am stepping on a minefield here—new social
classes emerge as the dominant groups. A little over a thousand
years ago, the machine first became a tool of production in the
West. Before 800, the windmill and the waterwheel were toys.
But then they became tools of production in the Europe of 1800.
A little later, the spinning wheel came in, invented probably in
China but really used primarily in Europe.
And out of the Middle East, out of Persia, came the stir-
rup and the horse collar. And the new class that emerged as
dominant was the feudal knight. Suddenly you could fight on
horseback because you had the stirrup, and you had the horse
collar. Before that, you couldn’t shoot off an arrow without be-
ing thrown backward. You couldn’t do it because you had to put
your feet on the ground, and the stirrup gave you that place.
Otherwise, Newton’s Second Law—you know, “to every ac-
tion there is a reaction”—would just have thrown you over the
horse. And so the feudal knight became one dominant group.
The other one was the craftsman. The city of antiquity was not
the city of craftsmen; it was the city of slaves, primarily. And
suddenly you had the craftsmen and the craftsmen’s guild and
the Swiss weavers and the shoemakers and the armorers and the
goldsmiths and the wheelwrights, and they dominated the new
phenomenon—the city, the occident or the Western city. And
800 years later, at the end of the seventeenth century, the steam
engine was designed. And while the old classes didn’t disap-
pear, they became marginal. The new dominant ones were the
blue-collar industry worker and what we usually mean when we