Page 149 - The Drucker Lectures

130 [ The Drucker Lectures

to be when he practices neurosurgery, he begins by learning gross
anatomy. And there has been very little that’s new in gross anat-
omy since about 1680, very little. The bones haven’t changed.
We haven’t added a single bone or lost one. Sure, we know a
good deal more about things that baffled the great anatomists of
the seventeenth century—glands and organ functions and lots
of things. But fundamentally, the skeleton that you can see in
Dutch paintings of the 1680s hanging in the doctor’s office is the
same skeleton from which a young medical student still learns
gross anatomy. Those are the foundations, and if he didn’t know
his gross anatomy, he’d do untold damage as a neurosurgeon.
The foundations become doubly important in period of
change. This is partly because one is apt to forget the funda-
mentals during such times, and partly because one is then prone
to reinvent the wheel unless there is solid foundation. And yet
there are periods in any discipline, in any practice, when you
have genuine changes that are more than just refinements—that
are more than just slight variations on a familiar theme.
When you look at our field, at management, we are all prob-
ably pretty far advanced in such a period of considerable change.
It isn’t the first one. Within the last 100 years we have had at
least two—and in each of them, people have had to relearn and
redirect themselves. If you go back a little over a hundred years,
the contemporaries were totally baffled by the emergence of
what we today call the modern business (and, incidentally, just
as baffled by the emergence of the modern university and the
emergence of the modern civil service). They couldn’t figure it
out. It just didn’t fit with anything anybody knew.
To a large extent this was a gross misunderstanding of the
emergence of people who for the first time combined what had
until then been totally separate functions. One was the mer-
chant function. Another was the capitalist function. And an-
other was the inventor function or the entrepreneur function.