Page 181 - The Drucker Lectures

162 [ The Drucker Lectures

controls, and not that of the brain surgeon—even though the
brain surgeon represents many more years of training and gets a
much larger fee. If an executive is posted to a foreign country, the
knowledge he or she needs, and in a hurry, is the fairly low skill of
acquiring fluency in a foreign language—something every native
of that country has mastered by age 2 without any great invest-
ment. The knowledge of the knowledge society, precisely because
it is knowledge only when applied in action, derives its rank and
standing from the situation and not from its knowledge content.
This, too, is new. Knowledges were always seen as fixed stars,
so to speak, each occupying its own position in the universe of
knowledge. In the knowledge society, knowledges are tools and,
as such, dependent for their importance and position on the task
to be performed.
One final conclusion: Because the knowledge society perforce
has to be a society of organizations, its central and distinctive or-
gan is management.
When we first began to talk of management, the term meant
business management. But we have learned in this last half
century that management is the distinctive organ of all orga-
nizations. All of them require management, whether they use
the term or not. All managers do the same things, whatever
the business of their organization. All of them have to bring
people—each of them possessing a different knowledge—to-
gether for joint performance. All of them have to make human
strengths productive in performance and human weaknesses
irrelevant. All of them have to think through what are results
in the organization, and all of them have to define objectives.
All of them are responsible to think through what I call “the
theory of the business”—that is, the assumptions on which the
organization bases its performance and actions, and equally,
the assumptions on which organizations decide what things
not to do.