Page 89 - The Drucker Lectures

70 [ The Drucker Lectures

productivity of all wealth-producing factors. The productivity
of capital may be more important, and it’s been going down the
last few years.
We also have to make knowledge work productive, including
the work of the manager.
I am going to be blunt and say I see very little evidence that
knowledge work has become more productive, whether you are
speaking of the teacher or the hospital or the government agency
or most industrial business managers. Of course, one problem is
that we don’t know how to define productivity and knowledge
work. You can’t just measure it the way you measure the number
of pairs of shoes that come down the line because there are few
things as unproductive and as little pleasing to God or man as
an engineering department that with great elegance and precision
and dispatch and industry designs the wrong product. So produc-
tivity is not easy to define for knowledge work. But we will have to
manage it. Without it, we will become the victim of expectations.
I’ve been talking about specifics. And I really shouldn’t. I
really should be talking about something far more important
and far more pervasive. When some of us in this room here
were born, the number of people in the workforce of this or any
other developed country who worked for organizations was so
small that the census barely paid attention. The great majority
of people, of course, were still on the land. Or they had been on
the land only a few years earlier—1900, 1895, or so. And there
were plenty of people who were employed, but they worked for
a master, either as a butcher’s boy or as domestic servants or as
journeymen in a small craft shop. And the number of people
who worked for an organization was a very small and mostly
industrial proletariat out of sight of polite society, by and large.
Today, eight out of ten work for an organization where there is
no master, where even the top man is just another hired hand.
And as the events of a few years in the universities made very