Page 207 - The Drucker Lectures

188 [ The Drucker Lectures

tries do not have a qualitative advantage in knowledge work.
The knowledge workers in China or India are every bit as good
as ours are. The only difference is that the developing countries
have so many fewer ones. China, which has worked the hard-
est on building higher education, has proportionately in colleges
and universities not much more than 3 to 5 percent of the figure
it would need to have the same proportion we have in the United
States. And the same is true of India. We have a quantitative
advantage. But it will be decisive only if we work at making the
knowledge worker productive.
This is going to be the basic challenge in all developed coun-
tries. And so far, we have done practically nothing to make
knowledge workers productive. For over 100 years we have been
working, and with great success, at making manual workers pro-
ductive. But when it comes to the knowledge worker there is no
sign that he or she has become the least little bit more productive
in the last century.
In fact, all of our figures would indicate that most knowledge
workers today are less productive than they were in 1929. When-
ever we make a study of knowledge workers we find that they
spend a very small part of their time on the work they have stud-
ied for, the work they want to do, and the work we pay them for.
Nurses in the hospital are probably the best-educated and best-
prepared knowledge workers in the world today, in every devel-
oped country. But whenever we make a study on nurses we find
that at least 70 percent, and usually closer to 80 percent, of their
time is spent on work that adds nothing to their productivity and
their performance. They are being misused as low-level clerks.
When we look outside the developed countries, including our
own, the single most important event of the next 10 years will be
what happens in China.
There are still 800 million Chinese making their living as
farmers. But China barely needs more than half that number to