Page 147 - The Drucker Lectures

128 [ The Drucker Lectures

that hit me was that even though a good many of these cases
took place in the 1920s or ’30s, and basically the book comes to
an end with World War II, really nothing new has happened.
These are exactly the kind of situations that you will encounter
and your successors will encounter in your companies. And it
reminded me of a very wise man I knew. This must have been
around 1960 when we talked about the tremendous explosion
and expansion of management. And this friend of mine said,
“You know, Peter, 99 percent of all managers today do exactly
what managers did in 1900. There are only so many more of
them.” And I think this is profound wisdom.
Most of us do exactly what our ancestors did, only so many
more of us are required. And that’s why we now have business
schools. A hundred years ago, we required a very small number
of naturals who came up in the school of hard knocks. And the
trouble with the school of hard knocks is that the knocks are so
hard, the casualty rates are very great, and we can’t afford to lose
that many. That’s why we have schools, which are basically a
protection, a protective device.
So much of it is continuity and not novelty. To be sure, when
you read that Sloan book, the terminology is occasionally a little
old-fashioned. I kind of smiled because he had such a terrible
time trying to describe cash flow. The word didn’t exist, and
he had to explain it to somebody. But it’s very clear what he
means. And the tools Sloan had—while he was trained as an
engineer, I’m not sure he had a slide rule because he graduated
before 1900. Certainly he had no computer. But the situations
are exactly what you encounter today: capital appropriations, de-
cisions in organization, decisions on how one squares the need
to organize according to logic with the need to staff according
to personality. That’s nothing new. So let me start out by saying
that, yes, the tools change, the terminology changes, the empha-
sis changes. But the tasks are very much the same.