Page 56 - The Drucker Lectures

5

Management in the Big

Organizations

1967

t is an open question whether mankind will be around long
Ienough for the historians to go to work on the twentieth cen-
tury. But if and when they do, 100 or 200 years hence, they will
surely put into the center of their attempt to understand this
crazy time of ours something that we generally pay very little
attention to. They are likely to see as a center of this century of
ours the emergence of the large-scale organization as our organ
for the accomplishment of practically every single social job of
an advanced society.
If you go back to, let’s say, the year before World War I started,
1913–1914, well within living memory, you would find a society
in which the large organization was unknown by most people.
Most people had no contact with it, had never seen one, had only
been aware of it the way one hears of monsters, dragons, sea ser-
pents, and other curiosities that may or may not really exist.
The YMCA in the United States today spends more money
annually than the total budget of the United States before World
War I. Your budget is well over $200 million, and you are not a
large organization by our modern standards. I don’t know how
many people realize that the army of tiny little Israel, with two
and one-half million people that just defeated the Arabs, packs

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