DWD20200308

David's Time With Peter F. Drucker 2020.3.8 By now these assumptions have become untenable. The best example is of course the pharmaceutical industry which increasingly has come to depend on technologics that are fundamentally different from the technologics on which the pharmacentical research lab is based: genetics, for instance, microbiology molecular biology medical electronics an so on. In the 19th century and throughout the first half of the 20th century, it could be taken for granted that technologies outside one's own industry had no, or at least only minimal, impact on the industry. Now the assumption to start with is that the technologies that are likely to have the greatest impact on a company and an industry are technologies outside its own field. The original assumption was of course that one's own research lab would and could produce everything the company——or the company's industry ——needed. And in turn the assumption was that everything that this research lab produced would be used in and by the industry that it served. Technologies, unlike the 19th-century technologies, no longer run in parallel. They constantly crisscross. Constantly, something in a technology of which people in a given industry have barely heard (just as the people in the pharmaceutical industry had never heard of genetics, let alone of medical electronics) revolutionizes an industry and its technology Constantly such outside technologies force an industry to learn, to acquire, to adapt, to change its very mindset, let alone its technical knowledge. ——《Management Challenges for the 21st Century·Chapter1》(Peter F.Drucker,1999)