Page 168 - The Drucker Lectures

19

The Era of the Social Sector

1994

et me start out by saying that it is a great pleasure to be here
Ltoday and to talk about the nonprofit organization: why we
need it, what it will have to do, and what its requirements and
problems are.
Manufacturing today is going the way of farming. New jobs
are there and plentiful; they are good jobs largely, but different
jobs. They require, above all, a great deal of formal education
and a great deal of skill, and so they are not jobs in which people
out of the factory can easily move into the way farmers 30 years
ago could easily move off a very poor farm into well-paid factory
jobs with high job security.
This is a social transition. It is not something in which gov-
ernment can do very much. In fact, the problems we now face are
not problems government is good at dealing with. Governments
are very good at doing things that embrace the entire nation, but
most of the tasks we have today are local and are not done well
by a central bureaucracy. They are done well on the local level.
Most of them are very specific jobs. They require organizations
and institutions that are very, very narrowly focused.
Let me give just a few examples, and I think that they would
apply to Japan just as much as they apply to any other developed
country. We need to retrain workers, and that is a crying need
that we know cannot be fulfilled except very locally, working

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