Page 60 - The Drucker Lectures

Management in the Big Organizations [ 41

reaucratic one by necessity, in which there have to be rules and
regulations and executives. For, of course, every one of these
institutions is a fiction. You read in the papers that General
Electric raised the prices of electric blankets, but in fact some
people at GE did this. General Electric by itself can’t do any-
thing. Neither can the YMCA, or the University of Nebraska,
or the Defense Department, or any other of these institutions.
The institution is shorthand for people. In every one of them
the effectiveness—indeed, the existence—of these organizations
depends on the executives.
They are a very sizable number of people, but they still are a
minority—one out of fifty or one out of every hundred people.
Their dedication and effectiveness set the basic tone, the ba-
sic direction, the basic purpose of the organization. Because our
study of these organizations has focused on business or on the
government agency, we do not see as yet that there is a common
and a new task: the task of the executive. It is a new task only
because the number we need is so much larger than any such de-
cision-making group we have ever had. It is a new task because
it’s a new kind of organization we have never had.
Each of these organizations is concerned with only one small
area of human needs, human wants, and human satisfactions. If
you compare our present highly pluralist society with any other
pluralist society, you will see the difference. We had a pluralist
society only a few hundred years back. But then, the various
kinds of organizations were all doing the same thing. The king
and the duke, the baron and the count, and the abbot down to
the yeoman were all landowners. All, in effect, ran total com-
munities, concerned with all community needs. They only dif-
fered in size.
We have no one total organization. Every one is fragmented;
everyone is partial. One is there for the satisfaction of economic
needs, and the other for the satisfaction of health-care needs,