Disagreement With Drucker

 

Peter Drucker may have invented the discipline of management and written several insightful books on that subject, but he has yet to address the subject of entrepreneurship ("The Entrepreneurial Mystique," Face-to-Face, October 1985). It is risk that separates entrepreneurs from managers. It should come as no surprise that the discipline of management is fairly simple and can be learned. But the ability to assume risk, which separates entrepreneurs from managers, is not merely a matter of a discipline to be learned.

There seems to be an attempt by some (and Drucker is not alone in this error) to remove the element of risk from entrepreneurship and to replace it with an artificial requirement of innovation. This error is apparently due to the great amount of innovation that has been introduced because of the entrepreneur's willingness to accept the risk of innovation in return for the potential profits. Innovation, however, is not required of every entrepreneur. The person who mortgages a house to open a print shop is no less an entrepreneur than someone who does the same to develop a new-generation computer in his garage.