Page 251 - The Drucker Lectures

232 [ The Drucker Lectures

company anymore. About two-thirds of the people who work for
them are not their employees.
The fastest-growing industry segment in the United States
is made up of professional employee managers—companies that
manage the employees of other companies. The largest is called
Exult, and it’s down in Irvine [California]. It manages for Brit-
ish Petroleum and Unisys and what have you.
These people are employees of Exult. They work full-time for
many years for British Petroleum. Whose employees are they? Brit-
ish Petroleum is not equipped to manage them. Exult just provides
labor, basically. One of the very big challenges is how do we learn
to manage—manage may even be the wrong word—to look after
the people who work for us full-time, year after year after year, and
who are not legally our employees. How do we do that? Nobody
yet knows how to do that. Don’t ask me; I don’t know.
Sixty percent of the people who work for Fuji are not their
employees. And they have no personnel policy for them. And it
causes no end of trouble.
So what you see very rapidly is that the corporation of to-
morrow has contracts here and minority participations there and
know-how agreements. It is a network. It is a confederation. And
so you have to learn to work with people whose values are differ-
ent and whose goals are different, and whom you can’t control.
The secret of an alliance is that you start by asking your
partner: “What are you trying to achieve? What is important to
you?” You don’t say, “This is what we want from you.” Rather,
you ask, “What do you want from us?” And this is going to be
central to the corporation.
Another change: Since at least 1950, we’ve worked on the
productivity of capital with very great success. We now will have
to work on the productivity of the new workforce.
One area to consider is the ratio of women to men. Look, 30
years ago in a meeting like this, there would have been practi-