Page 148 - The Drucker Lectures

Knowledge Lecture V [ 129

The other day I sat down with a very brilliant medical scien-
tist who is on the advanced frontier of medicine, and we talked
about the tremendous quantum leap in instrumentation. And he
said, “But you’ll note that when it comes to what’s truly essential,
which is to how one looks at the patient, none of us has as good
or as careful an eye as Hippocrates. And, that was 3,000 years
ago, and if we could only teach that to the young doctors, the
rest would be easy.”
The executive of tomorrow better learn the craft, the founda-
tions. And I say that bluntly because, people, I’m not very happy.
I see a good deal of the likes of you in our executive management
program, and you are weak in the fundamentals. And you are
weak for two reasons. One is because you are so specialized. In
this country, most people come up in a specialty until they are
pretty higher up, and they don’t really get the exposure to any
other part of business or management in the formative years. And
maybe that’s a strength, but one will always pay the price. When
I look at the people who are in my executive management group
who are top-flight marketing people, it is amazing what they
don’t know about—call it quantitative, call it accounting, call it
analysis. And what they don’t know about managing people is
a little frightening, and that’s why they come to us. And I hope
that’s what we help them to overcome, to add the understanding
of the other dimensions of a business or an organization.
Yes, one needs the latest techniques, but one needs the funda-
mentals. And that’s addressed not only to you. That’s addressed
to me and to others in academia because we also forget the fun-
damentals. It’s very easy to do. All of us tend to be specialists, and
we make our careers, oh, by publishing learned research papers
in a learned journal on the newest wrinkle. And we don’t our-
selves stress the fundamentals. We take them for granted, which
is always a mistake. We need to remind ourselves—and also re-
mind you—that no matter how advanced that physician is going