Page 256 - The Drucker Lectures

The Future of the Corporation II [ 237

One of the great weaknesses we have in the business schools
today is that we believe results are obvious. Another is that, so
far, we have looked at management from the inside out. We have
not yet begun to look from the outside in, and I have a hunch
that this is going to be the next 30 to 40 years of our work.
All of our early organizations had one major goal, which was to
prevent change or at least to delay it. But the business organization
exists to create change and to exploit change. All early organiza-
tions also aimed at monopoly. But the modern organization—and
I’m not talking only of business—exists in a competitive world.
And so you have to ask: What does this mean in terms of results?
It used to be that if you had a paper company and you had a
paper laboratory, all the work of the lab went toward the produc-
tion of paper, and everything the paper industry needed came
out of that lab. That was the theory on which the great labs
of the nineteenth century were founded. They were focused on
one industry, and it was the common assumption that to a given
industry pertains a certain technology and to a given technology
pertains a certain industry.
Most of us in this room still believe this. But if you look at
where the competition comes from now, that’s not the way it is.
Today, if I run a company and I need a six-month loan, do I
go to the bank? Probably not. I go to Goldman Sachs and sell
commercial paper. And yet commercial paper was not invented
by the commercial bank. It was invented 200 years ago. And in
this country nobody paid attention to it until some smart cookie,
around 1948 or 1949, either in Morgan Stanley or Goldman
Sachs, read the small print. And they started commercial paper.
Or if you look at the technology that is rapidly changing the
last of the great materials industries of the nineteenth century—
aluminum—it not coming out of the aluminum industry. It is
coming out of plastics. Technologies are no longer tied to one
specific industry. They crisscross.