A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

APPROACH PROBLEMS WITH YOUR IGNORANCE ■ 59
is exactly the opposite. I do not use my knowledge and experience at all.
I bring my ignorance to the situation. Ignorance is the most important
component for helping others to solve any problem in any industry.”
Hands shot up around the room, but Peter waved them off. “Ignorance
is not such a bad thing if one knows how to use it,” he continued, “and all
managers must learn how to do this. You must frequently approach problems
<strong>with</strong> your ignorance; not what you think you know from past experience,
because not infrequently, what you think you know is wrong.”
Liberty Ships Prove the Value of Ignorance
<strong>Drucker</strong> immediately launched into a story to prove his point. His stories
generally covered the wide range of <strong>Drucker</strong>’s reading and thinking—from
the Catholic Church to Japanese culture, politics, history, Jewish mysticism,
warfare, and of course, business. The stories were usually fairly short, but
sometimes they were much longer. Many times I heard Peter launch into an
answer to a question and his “answer” wasn’t an answer at all. It was a story
that led to a story <strong>with</strong>in a story that led to another story <strong>with</strong>in that story.
I am ashamed to say, and sorry too, that sometimes I got lost and allowed
my mind to become disengaged from his line of reasoning. This was truly
unfortunate, because although <strong>Drucker</strong> might lecture for an hour or more
in this fashion, all of the stories and information were linked. In the end,
he would tie it all together, and if you stayed <strong>with</strong> him you could see that
to understand his answer completely, it required that you understand
everything else he had talked about, including the Pandora’s box of stories.
However, on this particular chilly day, his tale was neither long, nor
linked to other sets of information. Moreover, it had to do <strong>with</strong> a subject
<strong>with</strong> which I was familiar. When I was a cadet at West Point, the Hudson
River, for several miles was packed <strong>with</strong> hundreds of immobilized, nolonger-used
ships. Each looked the same, about 400–500 feet long and
clearly inactivated. I was told that these sleeping giants were called Liberty
Ships and had been built on an emergency basis during World War II.
<strong>Drucker</strong> now proceeded <strong>with</strong> the story to illustrate his point.
“After World War II broke out in 1939,” he began, “the British were
losing thousands of tons of shipping to German submarines. This was not
unimportant, as the British needed the supplies and munitions these ships
brought to feed their population and to continue to fight the war.
“In response to the demand and their high losses due to German submarines,
the British had come up <strong>with</strong> a design for an inexpensive cargo