Page 257 - The Drucker Lectures

238 [ The Drucker Lectures

And so you are in a world in which your competition is not
just from those who make the same goods or produce the same
services. You don’t know where the competition will come from.
And you have to decide to define your results in terms of con-
stant change and innovation.
This is just as true for the community organizations as it is
for business—which are in fact changing a good deal faster than
business enterprise. How many of you are familiar with Rick
Warren’s church at Saddleback in Orange County [California]?
Rick, who is now in his fifties, has created a megachurch out of
nothing by not doing anything the way traditional churches do.
Instead, he thinks about the church as a change agent, a change
leader, and a competitor.
And you have to define what competition means. It is not
what the textbooks tell you. You have to produce results in the
short term. But you also have to produce results in the long term.
And the long term is not simply the adding up of short terms.
The question that must constantly be asked is: “If we are do-
ing something because we see the short-term opportunity, will it
make it more difficult for us to obtain our long-term results? Or
will it help? And vice versa.”
There’s an old medical proverb that says it doesn’t help much
if a sick, old woman is going into surgery tomorrow to save her
life and she dies during the night. But it also doesn’t help if she
survives the night and dies during surgery. So you have to have
short-term results and long-term results, and the two have to be
compatible and yet they’re different.
And so this is the challenging task ahead of us. What are
results? How do you define them? How do you balance them?
I should note that I proposed the first “balanced scorecard” in
my book The Practice of Management. In fact, the balanced score-
card that is now being sold out of the Harvard Business School is
almost identical to the one I proposed, even though these people