Page 160 - The Drucker Lectures

The New Priorities [ 141

work more than anybody else—2,000 hours a year. We in this
country work 1,800 hours a year, the Germans, 1,650. Now, you
may say not all of it has been well spent; five hours a day watch-
ing television may be a very poor use of extra hours. But that’s
the way it is.
Today, this no longer counts because less than one-fifth of
the labor force in developing countries makes and moves things.
Eighty percent are in knowledge work and service work, where
the productivity is miserable, to put it mildly. In fact, there ain’t
none. Does anybody here believe that the teacher of 1991 is
more productive than the teacher of 1900? And service work is
worse. The productivity of knowledge work and the dignity of
service work are our next big priority, and there’s not a blessed
thing that government can do to help. This is what employers
have to work on.
The third priority, and it’s going to be a difficult one, is that
we are shifting from a world in which bigness matters to a world
in which bigness is irrelevant. You know, the elephant is not a
more effective animal than the cockroach. In fact, cockroaches—
as all of you in Washington know—will survive all of us. No, size
is functional, and the advantages of bigness are gone with infor-
mation. And so we have a very real question: How do we make
this transition to a world in which yesterday’s bigness no longer
helps and is actually in many cases a severe disadvantage? We are
moving into structural change where size follows function and by
itself confers no advantage. Size becomes a strategic choice, and
I think one of the priorities for business is to think through what
the right size is for us, where we really fit our logical niche.
So we face a very different world with very different priori-
ties. And as I said, we are halfway through this period, or a little
more. By the year 2015 we will be over it, but the next 25 years
will still be years of very fast, unprecedented change. We can
just begin to see, very dimly, the outline of that new structure.