Almost all of the conventional wisdom about entrepreneurship, says Peter Drucker, is dead wrong. Entrepreneurship is nothing more than a discipline and, like every discipline, it can be learned.
Peter F. Drucker loves to walk in the mountains -- high up, where the air is cool and the view is expansive. He knows the names of the animals and plants below him and of the peaks, and he knows the relationships they have to one another. Noticing things is his great gift, seeing their connection to other things, and then sharing his way of seeing with whoever cares to come along with him.
He does much of his writing within sight of mountains -- the San Gabriel mountains in California, where he lives most of the year, and the Colorado Rockies, where he has a summer home. Maybe this accounts for the detached clarity that he brings to work that has lifted Drucker to preeminence among observers of modern business institutions.
Mr. Drucker -- he is a man one wouldn't dream of calling Peter on brief acquaintance -- has written 21 books, which have sold in the millions and been translated into 20 languages. Much of this output, which includes countless articles, has focused on management, a discipline that many people -- not the least of whom is Drucker himself -- credit him with inventing. He published The Practice of Management in 1954, then came Managing for Results (1964) and The Effective Executive (1966), followed by his Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973). All of these books are still in print.
But while Peter Drucker may be the master teacher of modern management, there are serious collectors and curators of Oriental art who have never heard of Drucker the management expert. They know him only as the authority on certain periods of Japanese art. Further, the man has written as many books -- nine -- on economic, political, and social affairs as he has on the principles and practice of management. He has also written a charming autobiography and two novels.
With Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which was published this year, Drucker turns finally to a subject currently much in vogue. It is the response of a wise old man -- Drucker is 76 -- to In Search of Excellence and the dozens of Excellence clones clogging bookstore shelves.
It is a book in three parts. Innovation, Drucker says in Part I, is an entrepreneur's tool. It isn't a thing, but an action -- what the entrepreneur does to impart value to a resource. Oil was just something that made the soil unsuitable for growing crops until some entrepreneur realized its potential as a fuel.
Drucker's main point is that innovation isn't mysterious, it doesn't depend on inspiration, it isn't an activity confined to a special class of geniuses. Just as systematic research can result in the "invention" of a new product, so there can be -- needs to be -- purposeful pursuit of opportunities for innovation. The company or individual who knows where and how to find the opportunities will be the better entrepreneur."Purposeful innovation," says Drucker, means monitoring seven sources of opportunity:
* the unexpected -- unexpected successes, failures, or outside events
* the incongruous -- differences between the world as it is and as it "ought to be"
* a process need -- a better way to do a familiar job
* unpredicted changes in an industry or market structure
* demographics -- population changes
* changes in perception, mood, meaning
* new knowledge
None of the seven categories should surprise anyone. That is what makes Drucker himself a writerly sort of entrepreneur. He has taken widely available experience, arranged it in useful form, and packaged it in masterful style. Most of his readers, as they go along, will find themselves nodding in delighted recognition of what they "always" knew, but never saw in just that way until Drucker saw it for them.
In Part II, Drucker asserts that anyone or any organization can be an entrepreneur -- individual, small business, big business, or government institution. "The rules are pretty much the same, the things that work and those that don't are pretty much the same, and so are the kinds of innovation and where to look for them," Drucker writes. The best innovators, however, aren't new businesses; not even small businesses -- and least of all new, small high-technology businesses. Most of them, says Drucker, are incapable of serious innovation. Big companies are where the important changes are taking place. In fact, if the big companies and big institutions don't innovate and change, Drucker warns, the social costs of their obsolescence and eventual failure may be unbearable.
In Part III, Drucker outlines strategies that entrepreneurs can use to bring innovations successfully to market:
* being "fustest with the mostest"
* hitting them where they ain't
* finding the ecological niche
* changing the economic characteristics of a product or market
As with his list of innovation sources in Part I of the book, Drucker takes familiar elements -- there is nothing new about niche marketing -- and organizes them into coherent categories. His innovation is in giving form, structure, and memorability to the familiar.
Unlike the sweaty fervor that Tom Peters brings to the subject of entrepreneurial management, Drucker delivers his wisdom with cool detachment. Businesspeople who read it, especially people running smaller businesses, will recognize their own problems in Drucker's examples and will appreciate his skill in sorting through the trivia to uncover the unifying principles that will help bring purpose to confusion. But they will miss any sense of the emotional highs and lows -- the terror and relief, depression and joy -- that are also part of the business experience. Drucker is too much the rational pragmatist to dwell on sleepless nights as part of the entrepreneurial lifestyle. Such things, one feels him thinking, are stuff-and-nonsense, the worst sort of Romanticism.
Drucker isn't a simple man. Intellectually vain, he avoids personal publicity. Articulate, he eschews the glibness that would earn him invitations onto network morning news shows. The architect of business management practice, he is no tub-thumper for capitalism, which, he complained in The End of Economic Man, drafted 52 years ago, subordinates all other human progress to economic goals. The achievement of individual freedom and equality, he believes now as then, requires a new, non-economic social concept.
