Page 87 - The Drucker Lectures

68 [ The Drucker Lectures

also by new knowledge, which has been accumulating over the
last 30 years in physics and chemistry and biology, and informa-
tion theory, all of which has yet to produce technology. In the
social scene, we probably need even more innovation for the big
city, for the environmental problem, what have you. So I think
managers will have to learn to be both managers to husband
what we already know and understand, as well as innovators to
bring about and make effective and productive what we don’t yet
know and don’t understand.
At the same time, the next few years are years in which the
unspoken and passive assumptions most of us still have with re-
spect to managing work and worker will be challenged. We face
demographic shifts of great magnitude, which you can see even
more closely outside of this country. Mexico in the next 10 years
will have to find jobs each year for three times as many young
people entering the labor force than it ever found in any year of
its history. Most of them will not be highly educated or trained,
but better educated than any previous generation. The same is
true throughout Latin America, Southeast Asia, and to a lesser
degree in the developed countries.
We are past the population explosion, but we are now fac-
ing the effects thereof, particularly the effects of the tremendous
drop in infant mortality in the developing countries. In 1938, the
last year for which we have any figures that mean anything, four
out of five babies born did not reach age 18 and three out of five
did not reach age five. Now, three or four out of every five reach
adulthood. This tremendous achievement is presenting us with a
short-term but tremendous problem for which, incidentally, nei-
ther capitalists nor communists have any answer because they’ve
never faced it before.
At the same time, the more important development, perhaps,
is that the composition of the labor force is changing. In this
country now about half of the young people coming into the labor