The Icon Speaks:
An Interview with Peter Drucker
by Information Outlook
Follow the Leader
To many people Peter Drucker is a business icon. The 92 year old has written more than 30 books about society, politics, economics, and management during the past 60 years. He has also contributed articles to the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review.
Drucker was born in Vienna in 1909. After receiving his law degree, he worked in finance and journalism before moving to the United States. Soon after arriving in the United States in 1937, he began writing books. Through these books and his academic work at Bennington College in Vermont, New York University Graduate Business School, and Claremont Graduate University in California, Drucker has carved out a niche as one of the leading business thinkers of our time. He recently took a moment to share his thoughts with Information Outlook.
Information Outlook: What place do you think librarians and information professionals occupy within the broader organizational legions of knowledge workers?
Peter Drucker: General libraries (public libraries) do not contain information. They contain data. The customer decides what is information. Specifically, the general library contains no more information than does the telephone book unless the customer knows what he or she needs and wants. The general library is just a store, although librarians canand domake a difference.
In a special library the librarians have the knowledge that enables them to convert the data in the library into information for the clients. I am always amazed how much topical knowledge special librarians have about the international trade that is the business of their customers. Librarians in a special library know what their customers need and often they know it much better than their customers in the organization do. They can—and do—anticipate the customer's information needs. They can—and do—reach out to the customer and point him or her in the right information direction. They can—and do—know what new data is in their customer's field or sphere of interest.
To let you in on a secret, when I had a new client in a field of which I knew nothing (say a company making biomechanical products), I would first go to the librarian in the company's special library and say, "I know absolutely nothing about this field. What do I need to read and know that will enable me to understand what the client is talking about?" Not once have I been let down.
IO: If someone told you that all the information she needs is available on the world wide web for free, how would you respond?
PD: All of the data—or at least much of it—may be on the web. But in the first place this isn't information any more than the road atlas is information. Unless I know that I want to drive from Washington to Charlotte, NC, the atlas contains nothing for me.
I am reading, for instance, all the plays of Shakespeare. It's been years since I last read them and I find that I have forgotten almost everything. The reading is a wonderful and a most enjoyable surprise. Then I am reading, or rather struggling with, a very good book of statistics. I once thought that I was a reasonably good statistician. In fact I taught statistics for a few years. The book is not technically difficult but it is conceptually very challenging.
Neither the Shakespeare plays nor the statistics book is data I can find on the web. Sure, I could read both on-line, but it would be tiring on the eyes. I could not lay the book down and go back to it two days later. I could not turn back from The Midsummer Night's Dream or put the statistics book down and go for one of my earlier papers on statistical theory (yes, I wrote a few 60 years ago and they are fortunately forgotten) and say, "That is what I should have seen, it should have been obvious."
But there is another problem with the web. It is not a telephone book. A telephone book has a system. The web is a jumble of data without index. Maybe the search firms that now spring up will substitute for an index, though it is a very poor substitute. A library has an index. But even more important, it has a librarian who can say to me, "If this is what you are looking for, try Section H5." The code and the librarian convert the chaotic and unlimited universe of data into information and no web will ever be able to this, if only because there is no way to classify the universe. You first have to codify it.
IO: What do you think today's leading-edge knowledge worker should be reading? The Bible? The latest crop of business and management titles? Something in between those extremes?
PD: The important thing is that he or she should be reading. They'll need continuing education in their specialty. Knowledge changes incredibly fast and today's knowledge is tomorrow's ignorance. That is the greatest difference between skills and knowledge. Skills historically changed very slowly.
Socrates, who was a stonemason, would be at home in today's mason yard. The tools have not changed, nor have the methods. My name (Drucker) means printer and my ancestors were printers in Amsterdam, Holland, for 250 years from 1520 to the second half of the 18th century. In that time they did not have to acquire a single new skill; all the innovations in printing until the early 19th century had been made by 1530 or so.
But knowledge is different. My orthopedist is always learning new information about knees (I have a bad one from an old injury). So the first thing for the knowledge worker is to keep on reading to keep abreast of his or her knowledge area. That applies to whether you are a tax accountant, a physician, a dental assistant, or a librarian.
Specialized knowledge by itself is of limited productivity. The individual knowledge worker needs to be able to relate to the constellation of knowledge of which his or her own specialized knowledge is a star in the cluster. I am always appalled how little my brilliant and successful advanced executive management students (average age of around 45) know of the disciplines on which their own specialty depends. For instance, how little economics or statistics or government these bright business executives know. They don't have to be statisticians; they shouldn't be. But they need to know what statistics is all about, what its basic assumptions are, what it is good for, what it definitely is not good for, and where to go if they need specialized advice about what figures mean and can mean. They don't know that such a discipline exists. And so the statistician can make monkeys out of them and they do.
And then, there is need for a person to be generally educated. Otherwise you shrivel up much too soon. Whether this means reading the bible (I read the New Testament every few years) or reading the great 19th century novelists (the greatest and shrewdest judge of people and of society who ever lived), or classical philosophy (which I cannot readit puts me to sleep immediately), or history (which is secondary). What matters is that the knowledge worker, by the time he or she reaches middle age, has developed and nourished a human being rather than a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer.
Otherwise, a few years later, tax accounting or hydraulic engineering will become awfully stale and boring.
IO: What are the critical business trends that information professionals should observe as they strive to envision possible futures for their organizations?
PD: I'd say the single most important one is the need for all organizations to have information about the outside world. There are no results inside an organization. The only profit center, as I have often said, is a customer whose check doesn't bounce. Yet, present-day data systems produce almost exclusively inside data. We have incredibly little data about the outside. Companies may know a good deal about their customers. They know nothing, as a rule, about their non-customers—the people who should be our customers but buy from someone else. Why do they do that? And yet it is the non-customer where the important changes always start first.
The same is true of technology. The most important technological changes of the last fifty years originated outside of the industries most affected by them. In its information, the whole world has indeed been globalized, irrevocably. Yet very few institutions—business or non-business—know much about the world, the economy, the society, the market, and the values, outside their own market or outside their own country. I have been doing a good deal of work with churches of all denominations during these last 20 years and I am always amazed how little the priests and pastors know their own community beyond the four walls of their church.
The second major trend for librarians to watch is in managing employees and in managing people. The two are splitting. In respect to employees, the focus is increasingly shifting for rules, regulations, and on avoidance of trouble. In respect to people, it is increasingly shifting to the development of individuals and their strengths.
IO: Your writings deal quite a bit with communications. In view of the proliferation of e-mail, faxes, and mobile communications devices, what is your take on the quality of organizational communications today? Are they better or worse? How do you feel about today's workers being "linked" to their jobs on a "24/7/365" basis because of improved technologies?
PD: It is being chained by technology to the job 24/7. This is the wrong question to ask of an old workaholic like me. I have been chained to my work 24/7 for 70 years without benefit of any technology except a pencil and a yellow pad. And nothing is easier than to disconnect the technology. You have no one to blame but yourself if you are glued to your mobile phone while driving on the highway. (My motto is, of course, "Don't Do as I Do, Do as I Tell.") I cannot resist the telephone ringing! The effective people I know simply discipline themselves to have enough time for thinking. Maybe it is a few hours each day or a few weeks in the summer, or by locking the door and disconnecting the phone for three hours. Being on the job—except in an emergency—24 hours a day simply means that you are incompetent. Many years ago, when I was still in my twenties, an old and wise boss in London (I was the economist and asset manager for a small, fast-growing, private bank) stopped me in the afternoon when he saw me going out of the office with two big brief cases. "What have you got in them?" he asked. I answered, "Work for tomorrow."
"My boy," he said, "if you cannot do your work from 9 to 5 you are simply incompetent, and we'll have to let you go." I never learned it, but he was right. Learn to manage your time. The secret is not to do the five million things that do not need to be done and will never be missed. And if you live in an organization that does what the typical German organization did when I worked in Germany and promotes the employee who leaves work with two briefcases, then do what the intelligent Germans did—put bricks into these brief cases.
IO: What do you love about libraries?
PD: I love nothing about libraries. They are places. I love librarians and have been doing so since I was a young trainee, not yet 18, on my first job. After finishing high school in my native Vienna, I went to Hamburg in Germany as a trainee in a cotton-export firm. The work was terribly boring. I learned absolutely nothing in my 18 months as a trainee, except that I would not spend my life exporting cotton. But across from the building in which the firm had its offices was a branch of the Hamburg Municipal Library.
We started working at 7:30 in the morning and were through by 4:00. Since I didn't have any money to go to the movies more than once a week, I spent most evenings reading books borrowed at the library before going home. An elderly lady-librarian saw me coming in two or three times a week and asked me what I was reading. I really did not have an answer and so she gently guided me to the classics in English, French, German (I was multilingual), to the historians, and so on.
I have grown up reading. In those days, the 1920s, there was nothing else to do in the long winter afternoons and evenings after school and homework. We had no radio, no TV and the telephone was for emergencies. My father had a big and good library and I was allowed in it from my earliest childhood on.
We did read a great deal—especially the Latin and Greek Classics—in school. Still, until those early days in Hamburg, I had never focused my reading until that librarian did so by saying, "Have you ever read any Dickens or any George Eliot or any Tolstoy or any of the great 19th century historians?" Ever since, I have been in love with librarians. 
To hear more of Peter Drucker's thoughts about business and information professionals, listen to his speech at SLA 2002 in Los Angeles.
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