Page 270 - The Drucker Lectures

The Future of the Corporation IV [ 251

We also need an economic policy that accepts the fact that 90
percent of the workers in a developed economy are not manual
workers. They’re not working to produce goods but are service
workers and knowledge workers.
And, finally, we need to think through our national policy to
tilt to new realities in which capital is totally mobile and avail-
able anyplace at the same price. Today, the only differentiator is
the productivity of the human resource. Knowledge workers are
not interchangeable. No physical therapist is ever going to go
into clinical lab work, and nobody from the clinical lab is quali-
fied to become a nurse, and no nurse is qualified to become a
mathematician. We have a labor force the likes of which we have
not seen since the Industrial Revolution created a homogenous
labor force. We have a labor force of countless subunits, which
are not homogenous and are not interchangeable because each is
a specialty and requires long years of formal training. And we
will have to develop quite new and totally different thinking.
And you can probably begin by saying you can’t manage knowl-
edgeable people. You can only help them to be productive.

From a lecture given at Claremont Graduate University.