Page 171 - The Drucker Lectures

152 [ The Drucker Lectures

My youngest daughter, who is a very successful banker and
married and has two children, is the financial officer—unpaid,
of course—of the school district in which she lives. It has about
15,000 students. And though she spends two evenings a week
on that, she considers it her real contribution. She finds her job
at the bank, where she is very well paid, to be very interesting.
But she doesn’t feel that she is contributing something that cor-
responds to her values.
The commitment when I first came to Japan [in 1959] of
the entire country to rebuild was overwhelming. Japan had been
badly hurt, not just hurt physically, but even more hurt morally.
Its pride was hurt. That enormous need to rebuild, that commit-
ment, was overwhelming.
I went back home to the United States and told everybody
that Japan would be the next major economic power. In the ’50s,
everybody thought I was crazy. Statistics didn’t prove it; but the
spirit was there—the commitment that “I make a difference.”
Now that has been achieved. People like their jobs and are well
paid, and they like their companies. But there is no longer the
commitment that “I make a difference.” And without it, a nation
very soon begins to fall apart. It loses its heart, its soul. We need
a sector in which an individual can make a difference, can make
a commitment. We need the nonprofit sector.
Let me say that this is not something that should come as a
great surprise to you in Japan because, though I am afraid most
of you do not know it, you have probably the richest tradition of
community organization and community service and commu-
nity responsibility of any major country in the world. Sixty years
ago, when I was a very young economist working in a bank in
London, I began by pure accident to get interested in Japanese
art and then in Japanese history. One of the things that was
amazing to me was the tremendous community culture of the
Edo period [1603 to 1868]. This was reflected by the extent to