Drucker On Drucker: What's Changed Since 1954

 

It fazed Peter Drucker not a bit to learn we were writing an article on his 34-year-old book The Practice of Management; when it comes to the fundamental principles of managing people, he informed us, "nothing has changed" in the past three decades. We probed a bit, pointing out (for example) that workers today are typically much better educated than back then; surely the proliferation of undergraduate and advanced degrees (including M.B.A.s) must affect how companies deal with their employees. The response was pure Drucker: if U.S. companies think they're getting educated workers, they're living in a dream world.

"One of the delusions we have in this country is that we can hire educated people. The only industries that function well are the industries that take responsibility for training. The Japanese, you know, assume that when you first come to work you know absolutely nothing. That's the right assumption. And the Germans probably have the best system of apprentice training in the world.

"One of the big challenges ahead is not for business to spend more money on training -- it already spends more on training than the school system -- but to do a better job. Right now it's a scattergun approach. Exactly how to change it I'll leave to the experts. But if you start with the assumption that it's the job of the employer to train -- rather than believe that people come trained -- I think it would be better. We'd have apprentice programs, a different approach. School isn't preparation for work and never was."