Page 225 - The Drucker Lectures

206 [ The Drucker Lectures

of ten—the 80 percent who are no longer manual workers—half
of them are being paid for putting knowledge to work.
And it isn’t only that they need a very different preparation.
It is, above all, that they need to learn something that yesterday’s
school paid no attention to: They need to learn how to learn.
Knowledge makes itself obsolete very fast.
This coming Saturday I will teach—I still teach all day—
our advanced management program, and about half the people
in it are engineers. I asked them when we began this course a
few weeks ago, “How often do you have to go back to school?”
And they said, “Every other year, at least, to keep up with the
changes. And every three or four years, we go back to relearn
the basics, or we’re obsolete.” And these are not high-tech people
mostly. They are mostly people in traditional industries—a lot
of automotive, a lot of aviation, a lot of machine tools. And yet
this knowledge changes so fast. And the same is true of the phy-
sician or any other knowledge worker. I work closely with our
big local hospital on the training of nurses, and they have to
go back to school at least once every year for several weeks, and
every three or four years for three months, or they’re hopelessly
behind. This is something fundamentally new in human history.
And it means that the most important thing to learn in school is
how to learn—the habit of continuous learning.
Add to this that knowledge is effective only if specialized.
I may need a knee replacement in a few weeks—an old skiing
injury. And I’m going to somebody who does nothing else but
knee replacements. And that’s true in all areas.
At the same time, as you go up even a little bit in organi-
zations, you increasingly will have to relate your specialization
to the universe of specializations. The orthopedic surgeon who
will do my knee told me that he’s now taking a course in physi-
cal therapy. He is not going to become a physical therapist, but
it’s changed so much in the last few years, and he has to know