Page 150 - The Drucker Lectures

Knowledge Lecture V [ 131

These had been separate and discreet, and suddenly you had
people emerge—whether it was a J.P. Morgan or an Andrew
Carnegie or a John D. Rockefeller or the people who built Singer
sewing machine or International Harvest or General Electric
or the telephone company—very different people who somehow
seemed to combine things that didn’t belong together, at least
not in the way people had always looked at them. Accept the fact
that those who do new things are always suspected of sorcery
and of black magic, and yet when you look back in retrospect,
they were groping for building what we today call organizations
capable of continuity.
And then, as you know, after World War II we had another pe-
riod of change. Up to that time, while quite a few people worked
in organizations, very few of them were conscious of the phenom-
enon. Suddenly, we saw it. And you got into an age that the lit-
erature of the ’50s and ’60s described as being of The Organization
Man [William Whyte’s 1956 sociological commentary] and The
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit [Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel]. And
the people who worked and lived in large organizations seemed to
be totally impermeable to change. And, believe me, this is what
stimulated the enormous explosion of the business school. And
this is one reason why the business school in the next 20 years
will have to change a great deal. We have well-trained but also
very narrow people who together are a very, very strong army but
individually make a very minor contribution. When you look back
at the literature today, it was a gross exaggeration and caricature,
but it captured some things that existed or at least a tendency that
existed. And that was a great change in the perception of people
and their vision. In a way it started in this country, but it pervaded
the whole world—and no place more than Japan.
Now we may be halfway, or a quarter of the way, into an-
other change: Information is becoming the organizing principle
of organizations. And what does this mean for the individual?