Page 85 - The Drucker Lectures

66 [ The Drucker Lectures

you some idea of the boom and maybe also tells you that infla-
tion didn’t just begin last year.
But the management boom is over, and incidentally high
time, too. Like all booms, it lasted too long. Now we face the age
of management performance. For the last 25 years there have
been a lot of promises and a lot of good work, but I think the
time when we will have to prove that we have learned something
in management is just ahead. But also the time when we will
again have to learn new things because the management boom
was very largely fueled by knowledge and experience that had
been garnered in the long years when management was essen-
tially obscure and was being worked at by a very small number of
people in businesses and in a few academic environments. They
provided the capital on which we have been living in manage-
ment fairly lavishly these last 25 years, and now we will have to
begin to get new knowledge, attacking new challenges.
I’m only going to look at some of the things that I think
institutions today, let alone those who are coming into manage-
ment tomorrow, will have to concern themselves with. We are
at the end of what is the longest period of economic continuity
in modern western history—almost 30 years since the end of
World War II in which essentially the lineaments didn’t change
much. This is longer than at any time before. That era is clearly
at an end. So the manager will have to learn to tackle economic
challenges, which he doesn’t yet know about. And incidentally,
bluntly, I am very much concerned at the total lack of prepara-
tion, and that’s a deplorable state of economics, particularly for
people who will have to perform. I am very depressed by the fact
that my students don’t know anything, and what they know is
not relevant. I think we will have to learn economics, economic
structure, and economic dynamics, very much the hard way
again. The manager will have to learn it because the academi-
cians aren’t going to help you much. So he will have to learn.