Drucker: Job content. The question is not, am I interested in
biology. That interest may or may not change. You can't tell. The issue
is: when you work, do you want to sit down to a stack of information
reports and to plot figures for two weeks, or do you want to go around
and pick people's brains? Do you enjoy being alone, or do you have to be
a member of a team? How do you really function? There is a fabulous
amount of misinformation about jobs, because there is not one job pattern
that is clear. You just can't tell by the field.
And there's another highly important matter. No matter what job it
is, it ain't final. The first few years are trials. The probability that
the first choice you make is right for you is roughly one in a million.
If you decide your first choice is the right one, chances are you are
just plain lazy. People believe that if they take their job for G.E. or
NYU or Psychology Today that they have taken their vows, that the world
will come to an end if it doesn't work out.
PT: How many of us know from the very beginning what we want to
be?
Drucker: Contrary to everything that modern psychologists tell you,
I am convinced that one can acquire knowledge, one can acquire skills,
but one cannot change his personality. Only the Good Lord changes
personality-that's his business. I have had four great children, and I
can assure you that by the time they were six months old, their
personalities were set in concrete. After six months, parents get
educated but not children. One can take a child and try to bring him out
of excessive timidity, but you won't ever make a bold one out of him. Or,
one can take a bold one, a rash one, and try to teach him how to count to
ten before shooting with the hope that he will count at least to three.
But that is all one can do. One can take a charmer and try to get
him-charmers are mostly boys-to work to catch up with what he has
improvised. And one can get one of those awful, horrible, overplanners to
jump once in a while. But you are not going to change the basic
structure. It is much more important that in this age of psychology
people tell the kids that what you are matters, and your values
matter.
PT: Now, what about going to graduate school? Suppose one has
learned all he can about himself. Should he go on to graduate school
before he tries his first job?
Drucker. In graduate school they are going to postpone themselves,
and they will do so with the peculiar idea that academia is a free
environment. They soon discover that graduate school is our least vented
environment. The arrogance, the petty restrictions of the learned are
horrible. Nothing is more demeaning than to be forced to be
conventionally unconventional.
PT: Politics in the groves of academia fascinate and appall me. The
infighting is worse than in the old Kansas City or Boston wards. And the
academicians are far more shrewd and vicious.
Drucker: There's only one kind of politics that's worse. We have
only 2,000 colleges, and academia is not so narrow here as in Europe. But
look at musicians. This country has never been able to support more than
25 pianists. If you are a first-rate pianist, you take the bread out of
somebody's mouth. That's not quite true of academia, but there is a
horrible frustration if you are not Number One. In academia there are
numerous jobs for the merely competent man, but not room for him.
PT: Would you then, say, go into the Peace Corps first, before
considering graduate school?
Drucker: No! The Peace Corps is a great disappointment.
PT: How can you say that? Why?
Drucker: I have seen too many kids when they came back. In their
personal development, they are exactly where they were when they left.
The Peace Corps is just a postponement, a delay. My conclusion is that
one belongs in the Peace Corps in his 30s, not in his 20s. In the 20s he
belongs in the city administration of San Pedro, or out selling Gallo
wine.
PT: I see what you want. You think that any good young person
should go out and jump in somewhere, anywhere.
Drucker: Yes, and not with the typical question the kids ask the
recruiters: Is this the right place to stay for the next 35 years? Hell,
the answer in all likelihood is no. There is a right question to ask the
recruiter: Is this a place where I can learn something for two years and
have fun for two years, and where I will have a chance if I
produce?
PT: All right. I believe you. You'd put off graduate school?
Drucker: I'd put off elementary school if I had my way. I am not a
great believer in school. School is primarily an institution for the
perpetuation of adolescence.
PT: If you don't believe in school, how would you educate?
Drucker: That is an entirely different question. The thought that
school educates is not one I have accepted yet. No, I am not
joking.
PT: I know you are not joking.
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