Page 62 - The Drucker Lectures

Management in the Big Organizations [ 43

staff of the “Institute for Rehabilitation of the Horse.” Likewise,
when a subject becomes totally and hopelessly obsolete, the uni-
versity makes a required course out of it.
It is terribly hard for any institution to abandon simply be-
cause there is too much emotional investment in yesterday. The
less productive the effort, the harder one has to work to squeeze
a little result out of it, the more enamored of it do we become.
The real problem in the objectives area is therefore how to con-
centrate and how to abandon yesterday.
The second area in which executives have to perform you
might formally call “management.” How do we get common ef-
fort from a large number of people, each of whom is doing a
different job?
When they built the pyramids, they had 60,000 people there.
But they had no management problem because all anyone did
was to pull on a rope when the supervisor shouted, “One, two,
three, hup.” They did not have to worry what the workers should
do, how they should integrate their efforts, or how to communi-
cate. They were all pulling on the same rope.
But today in all our institutions we have the meteorologist
next to the economist, next to the banker, next to the salesman,
next to the quality-control engineer. Everyone does different
knowledge work, and yet we have to get one result out of all
of them.
The next management area is that of the effectiveness of the
individual executive himself. His is a different role, a role for
which the rules have to be written.
We also face areas of organizational ethics in which we have
to learn a great deal. One can’t do business, whether as a hospital
or as a soap company, without employing people to do the work.
One has to be someplace and has to have an impact on a com-
munity and its values. The ethical values of an organization are
therefore crucial, and we know very little about them.