To many people Peter Druckur 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 information is. 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 can--and do--make 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 is I can find on the web. Sure, I could read both online, 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.