Page 57 - The Drucker Lectures

38 [ The Drucker Lectures

20 times or more firepower than the Imperial German Army
packed in 1914 when it almost overran Europe. Each Israeli sol-
dier has at his disposal almost 2,000 times the firepower of the
Prussian soldier of 1914. There were then no universities in the
whole world that had as many as 5,000 students. The two that
came close to it, Berlin and Tokyo, were considered by all ex-
perts of that time to be so big as to be totally unmanageable.
In 1911, as I think most of you know, the U.S. Supreme Court
split the largest business of that time, the Standard Oil Trust, into
14 pieces. By 1940, every one of those 14 daughters was larger
than the parent had been 30 years earlier by every yardstick: em-
ployees, capital, sales. And yet only three of these Standard Oil
Companies were major oil companies. The remaining 11 were
mostly quite small and unimportant; yet every one of them was
larger than the “octopus” that had frightened our grandparents.
But much more important than the scaling up in size is the
fact that the large organization is not just confined in one sphere.
It is a general phenomena. What we mean by a “small business”
would have struck our great grandparents as unmanageably
large—300 to 400 employees. Nobody would have known what
to do with them in 1880, and as late as 1914 most activities were
carried out in family-size undertakings or in very small partner-
ships. Dickens’s picture of a business consisting of the boss, with
a confidential clerk who every once in a while would run out for
tea or beer, was still the picture of 1914 by and large.
And so it goes, whether you talk of research, business or gov-
ernment, of health care or education, or of volunteer agencies like
the YMCA. In every country you could have moved the entire
government of 1914—federal, state, and local—into a single one
of our new government buildings and still have room for a bowl-
ing alley and skating rink. This is true of Japan and Germany,
of the United States, England, and Australia, and of Russia. It’s
true also of all other institutions.