Page 61 - The Drucker Lectures

42 [ The Drucker Lectures

and the third one for defense, and so on. This is a very different
situation from any we have ever had. And the one thing we can
say so far is that all of them depend for their performance on
the executive. This very complex society of ours depends on the
executive, the manager, the administrator.
What do we need from him? We need several different
things.
First, managers must recognize that these organizations exist
for a need of ours. They are not an end in themselves. In fact, in
themselves, they make no sense whatever. You could not imag-
ine them someplace where there aren’t people around. They are
servants for a specific, narrow need of society.
The real problem here is not what organizations should be
doing, but how they prevent themselves from doing the wrong
things. The greatest problem we have here is that every single
organization tends to tackle far more things than it could possi-
bly handle. They all splinter themselves. They are all ineffectual
because they try to run in 50 directions at once.
Organizations also tend to keep on doing obsolete and result-
less tasks. This is the one area where business is way ahead of the
rest of us simply because it’s got the market test. The Ford Motor
Company, we say, abandoned the Edsel. Well, this is polite eu-
phemism. You and I abandoned the Edsel. All the Ford Motor
Company did was finally accept the fact when they no longer
could conceal it. They tried not to accept it as long as they pos-
sibly could. But if you are in a market, there comes a point where
you no longer can deny results and their verdicts.
We have government policies around that are infinitely more
bankrupt than the Edsel ever was—our relief policy and our
farm policy, for instance. But all we do when it becomes obvious
that there are no results is to double the money. There is no mar-
ket test. If we had had a Ministry of Transportation in 1820, a
great many of us today would occupy well-paid positions on the