Page 63 - The Drucker Lectures

44 [ The Drucker Lectures

The relationship of these institutions to each other is also
very peculiar. The United States government asks Company X
to take over the War on Poverty, and at the same time it’s put-
ting the executive of the same company in jail for antitrust viola-
tions. Caltech and MIT have more profit-making subsidiaries
than Sears Roebuck has stores, but they are “nonprofit.” Busi-
ness corporations are increasingly doing governmental work and
community work. This is a very peculiar mixture indeed.
We do not yet know the relationship among these institu-
tions. We do not know the relationship between institutions and
society as a whole. We do not yet know the relationship between
institutions and the individual.
In many ways, the new capacity to organize and to manage is
a great strength. But it is very recent—not even 100 years old. It
is also not very common outside of a very small group of people,
most of them white (with the exception of the Japanese) and
most of them in the Northern Hemisphere. The underdeveloped
countries are underdeveloped today mostly because they don’t
know how to manage—and we don’t yet know how to teach
them. We do know that this is the lacking ingredient. The mo-
ment you can manage, you are no longer underdeveloped. You
may still be poor, but you know how to get out of poverty fast.
The new thing that we have developed—or are developing—
is a new social structure in which we use our newfound capac-
ity to manage, to build institutions, to discharge social tasks.
This enables us to do things that our ancestors would not have
dreamed of in every area, whether you talk medicine, education,
science, warfare, or economic development. These are great new
capacities for doing better. But they also pose challenges. They
pose new problems above all to the manager, problems of his own
competence and problems of his own values and responsibilities.
We are just beginning to go to work on them, and perhaps the
most important thing to say is that at least we are beginning to