Page 58 - The Drucker Lectures

Management in the Big Organizations [ 39

Every place we see the emergence of large-scale managed
institutions as the center. I am not going to talk today about
whether this is good or bad. It’s obvious that some things we are
very proud of are largely the result of this institutional develop-
ment. The “education explosion” is one result. Organization is
our means for putting knowledge to work. Before the large in-
stitutions arose, knowledge was by and large a luxury of which
even a rich society could not afford a good deal. For what could
the man of knowledge do? There were only the traditional pro-
fessions that had not changed in 2,000 years—the priesthood,
the law, medicine, and teaching. As to the rest, a little knowl-
edge was a dangerous thing. It was at best an ornament, and the
sooner you forgot it and started selling bonds, the better off you
were. I started to work at age 18 as an apprentice clerk in an ex-
port house in 1927, 40 years ago. The one thing my then bosses
knew was that I had stayed in school much too long for a com-
mercial career (and they were right, incidentally). My boss’s son
had gone to work at age 14. Eighteen was an unthinkably late
age for anyone to go to work in the world of commerce. Today a
youngster who has only a high school degree is barely employ-
able. We are rapidly moving toward the blessed utopia where you
have to have a Ph.D. to be admitted into first grade. Maybe we
overdo it, but the fact that we can have work for people of knowl-
edge is a result of organization. This is the primary purpose of
organization—its ability to put knowledge to productive work.
You may say this is highly commendable and praiseworthy.
But the society of 1914 had its virtues—a society that looked
very much like the Kansas prairie, a society on which the high-
est thing on the horizon was the individual. Sure, there was a
little hill over there that looked terribly big: the government. In
reality, it was exceedingly small, as witness the fact that of the 48
governors, only six or so held office full time. The remaining 42
kept up their law practice or their real estate office. There simply