Page 145 - The Drucker Lectures

126 [ The Drucker Lectures

All of these things, which we can talk about learnedly but
can’t really define or measure, will be up for grabs. And we will
have a replay of an issue that agitated the early years of this cen-
tury—the polarity between what Thorstein Veblen, the great
sociologist of that period, called the instinct of workmanship
and the acquisitive instinct. In other words, they are both per-
formance, but they are very different kinds of performance. And
you need both. You need economic performance and you need
the instinct of workmanship, which if you use present-day terms
you would call marketing and innovation.
So when it comes to the information-based organization 10
years hence, one can already delineate some major challenges—
the challenge of converting middle management into expert
professionals, professional contributors rather than people whose
work it is to make others productive. Now, they must make
themselves productive.

From a lecture delivered at Claremont Graduate School (currently known
as Claremont Graduate University).