Here's an excerpt, pertaining to Perspectives On Entrepreneurship, from Dilip Mukerjea's book, Brainaissance: The Renaissance of the Brain, The Rebirth of Imagination:

Peter F. Drucker on Innovation and Entrepreneurship 

Drucker maintained that entrepreneurship is doing something differently so as to better use resources and expand markets for the product and/or service. From a hamburger stand in a single city, Ray Kroc turned it into an international business, McDonalds; this happened by innovating his products, services, and marketing. Kroc was an entrepreneur. Someone else running that hamburger stand without Kroc’s entrepreneur spirit may have had a thriving hamburger business but it wouldn’t have been McDonalds and that person wouldn’t have been an entrepreneur, just another hamburger stand owner. Drucker also believed that entrepreneurship and innovation are not inborn characteristics. They are behaviors that most people can learn and successfully apply to their ventures. 

He described seven sources of innovative opportunity: 

The Unexpected - via unexpected success, unexpected failure, and unexpected outside events. 

Incongruities - a discrepancy or dissonance between what is and what ought to be or is assumed to be, comprising four areas: economic realities of an industry (marketplace), other realities of an industry (optimisation of local, non-essential areas rather than system optimisation), customer expectations versus the industry perception of customer expectations, and internal incongruity with a process. 

Process Need - a weak or missing link in a process that makes the process cheaper, easier, or possible, through technological or economical feasibility. 

Industry and Market Structures - changes in industry or markets such as new competitors, new customers, more differentiated products, new manufacturing or marketing processes, new substitute or complementary products or services. 

Demographics - changes in population structure such as size, age, cultural composition, employment, education, and income. 

Changes in Perception - a change in the way facts are perceived, such as determining whether “the glass is half full” versus “the glass is half empty.” 

New Knowledge - the discovery of new knowledge, which can be exploited, such as a new technology or new materials. 

He debunked the belief that innovation is “a bright idea” and maintained that dependable innovative ideas come from systematic exploration of the seven sources of innovative opportunity. Drucker called The Bright Idea “the riskiest and least successful source of innovation opportunities.” The millions of worldwide patents that sit in patent offices gathering dust lend credence to his assertion. 

Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates a resource. There is no such thing as a resource until man finds a use for something in nature and then endows it with economic value. Until then, every plant is a weed and every mineral just another rock. 

~ Peter F. Drucker, The Sage of Business Wisdom

A QUOTE TO PONDER

This astute observation from the uber-guru drives home the point about the imperativeness and urgency of re-skilling, up-skilling, cross-skilling and even expert skilling initiatives, especially for professionals who want to stay relevant - and remain ahead - in today's VUCANT (VOLATILE, UNCERTAIN, COMPLEX,  AMBIGUOUS, NOVEL and TURBULENT) world!

INNOVATION AS A PURPOSEFUL AND SYSTEMATIC DISCIPLINE

[In continuation of my earlier post:]

Just sharing one of my most favourite and inspiring quotes: 

"In innovation, as in any other endeavor, there is talent, there is ingenuity, and there is knowledge. 

But when all is said and done, what innovation require is hard, focused, purposeful work. 

If diligence, persistence, and commitment are lacking, talent, ingenuity, and knowledge are of no avail." 

~ Peter F Drucker, 'Innovation and Entrepreneurship';

INNOVATION REQUIRES CREATIVITY + DISCIPLINE, IMAGINATION + RIGOUR

I like what I am reading:

"Innovation almost never fails due to a lack of creativity.

It's almost always because of a lack of discipline."

~ The new book, 'Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs', by Larry Keeley;

In fact, as I recall vividly, this is one of the salient points of uber guru Peter F Drucker when he wrote 'Innovation and Entrepreneurship' back in the 80's.

INTERESTING PERSPECTIVES ABOUT CREATIVITY & INNOVATION FROM GREAT MINDS

"‘Creativity’ is not the miraculous road to business growth and affluence that is so abundantly claimed these days… Those who extol the liberating virtues of corporate creativity… tend to confuse the getting of ideas with their implementation – that is, confuse creativity in the abstract with practical innovation."

~ Theodore Levitt, ‘Creativity Is Not Enough’ in Harvard Business Review (1963);

"Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives... most of the things that are interesting, important, & humans are the results of creativity... when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life."

~ Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi;

"There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress & we would be forever repeating the same patterns."

~ Edward de Bono;

"Creativity does not automatically lead to actual innovation... Creativity without a business plan & an organisational structure to administer the plan (i.e. action-oriented follow-through) is meaningless. At best, creative ideas remain good intentions..."

~ Peter F Drucker;

"Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practised. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes & their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation, & they need to know & to apply the principles of successful innovation."

~ Peter F Drucker;

So, in the final analysis, creativity is just ideation, which is the generation of new ideas by approaching problems or existing practices in innovative &/or imaginative ways.

Obviously, creativity must eventually link to innovation, which is the process of taking a new idea & turning it into a workable reality or preferably, market offering, to generate value, or usefulness in the case of the former.

Hence, ideation is not synonymous for innovation.

Very often, we tend to use 'Creativity' & 'Innovation' interchangeably. They should not be, because, while creativity involves coming up with new ideas, it is the bringing of the new ideas to life, i.e. action-oriented follow-through, that makes innovation the distinct undertaking it is.

Dilip Mukerjea likes to use his favourite expression to delineate the two: Ideas to Cash!

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"The entrepreneurial mystique? It's not magic; it's not mysterious, & it has nothing to do with the genes. It's a discipline, & like any discipline, it can be learned."

~ Peter F Drucker;

[The foregoing quote is my inspiration for creating & conceptualising a 12-month, 52-module 'Business School for Kids & Teens'. It will be one of my new projects in Indonesia, as the curriculum design involves the holding of 3 outdoor adventure camps - to inculcate risk-taking, team-building & leadership - of 3 day's duration each, to coincide with a breakdown of 3 semesters for the entire program.

Indonesia, with its vast & beautiful landscapes, has all the natural facilities for such camp venues.

Classroom learning will be combined with a multi- as well as an inter-disciplinary content immersion, in conjunction with project-based actvities, individual projects & group discussions, field-trips to businesses, interviews of successful entrepeneurs, portfolio assessment, sales bazaar or trade show, plus live presentations involving business plan pitches to a real-world venture capitalist panel.

The curriculum is even designed to include a career exploration module, to allow the kid or teen participants to consider a safer, alternative route - in order to gain valuable professional working experience - prior to embarking on an entrepreneurial initiative.

It will be a great opportunity to infuse young people with the entrepreneurial mindset. The entrepreneurs of tomorrow are in our schools today!]

DRUCKER ON LEADERSHIP TRAITS

Peter Drucker, the sage of Business Wisdom, rejected the possibility of finding even a few fundamental traits that could be seen as being typical of leaders.

According to him, the whole discussion of characteristics and traits is a waste of time:

“Leadership personality,” “leadership style,” and “leadership traits” do not exist. Among the most effective leaders I have encountered and worked with in a half century, some locked themselves into their office and others were ultragregarious.

Some (though not many) were “nice guys” and others were stern disciplinarians.

Some were quick and impulsive; others studied and studied again and then took forever to come to a decision.

Some were warm and instantly “simpatico”; others remained aloof.

Some spoke of their family; others never mentioned anything apart from the task in hand.

Some leaders were excruciatingly vain ~ and it did not affect their performance...Some were self-effacing to a fault... and again it did not affect their performance as leaders...Some were as austere in their private llives as a hermit in the desert; others were ostentatious and pleasure loving and whooped it up at every opportunity.

Some were good listeners, but among the most effective I have worked with were also a few loners who listened only to their inner voice.

The one and only personality trait the effective ones I have encountered did have in common was something they did not have: they had little or no “charisma” and little use either for the term or for what it signifies.”

[Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

A SUMMARY OF THOUGHTS: INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP VI

[continued from the Last Post.]

The Changing Values and Characteristics Strategy has a different focus to that of the other strategies.

Whereas the other strategies attempt to satisfy existing customers by creating new products or services, the Changing Values and Characteristics Strategy attempts to find new customers for existing products or services.

Drucker provides four ways of exploiting the Changing Values and Characteristics strategy:

· creating utility from an existing product

· pricing the product differently

· adapting the product to the customer’s social and economic reality, and

· delivering what represents true value to the customer.

An example of creating utility from an existing product is Rowland Hills’s re-engineering of the British postal system with the introduction of fixed postal rates and the creation of the postage stamp, in 1836.

By changing variable postal rates to fixed sums, evidenced by the use of a postage stamp, Hill made it possible for consumers of postal services to serve their own purposes: namely, sending a letter quickly and easily.

Previously, postage depended on the distance the package or letter had to travel; and the consumer was required to visit a postal center where the rate was calculated.

Standard postage rates improved the utility of the postal services through the use of collection boxes, and by substantially discounting the price of mail.

Classic examples of pricing the product differently are provided by the The Gillette Safety Razor and the introduction of the copier by the Haloid Company, later Xerox.

In both cases, the product, as razor or as copier, was sold at a steep discount. The supplies, razor blades in the case of the razor, or the paper copy itself in the case of the copier, were priced to make a profit.

Adapting the product to the customer’s social and economic reality usually means providing a system whose heart is the product and then selling the entire system.

Examples would be:

• General Electric’s packaging of GE consulting expertise with replacement turbine blades for its steam turbine products. GE’s competitors adopted the same practice but by then GE had market dominance.

• The financing that Cyrus McCormick provided to American farmers who purchased his harvesting machines.

Banks considered farmers a poor risk in the 1840’s; farmers, under-capitalized and with cyclic cash flows that depended on crop harvests, could not afford to purchase outright a McCormick reaper despite the obvious advantages of the machine.

McCormick provided farmers with an installment plan that spread payments over several years; the payments were due only when the farmers had cash, at harvest time.

Delivering value to the customer means using the product to deliver to the customer, values well beyond the retail value of the product itself.

An example would be a lubrication company that sells a special lubricant, indispensable to the machinery, as part of a maintenance programme for heavy equipment.

The company essentially sells the maintenance program, providing in-built peace of mind. This is because the lubricants ensure the continued operation of the heavy equipment, thereby minimizing down time.

[Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

A SUMMARY OF THOUGHTS: INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP V

[continued from the Last Post.]

(3) The Ecological Niche Strategy aims at controlling a market and comes in three flavors:

· The Toll-Gate Strategy

· The Specialty Skill Strategy, and

· The Specialty Market Strategy.

The Toll-Gate Strategy aims at market control through providing an indispensable product or service, based on patented or otherwise protected intellectual property; this enables the existence of some essential product or service.

The problem with the toll-gate strategy is that market conditions may render the product superfluous through substitution of either the product itself or the products or processes the toll-gate product complements or enables.

The growth toll-gate product is also dependent on the products or services the toll-gate product enables.

The example that Drucker provides is an enzyme developed by a company called Alcon, which is used during cataract surgery to dissolve a ligament. Sales of the enzyme depend on the number of cataract operations performed.

The Specialty Skill Strategy within the Ecological Niche depends on developing a high degree of competence in a formidable field so that entry barriers into the market are high enough to keep out competitors.

The difference between the toll-gate strategy and the specialty skill strategy is that the specialty skill is not necessarily based on protected intellectual property. It just isn’t economically feasible for a competitor to enter the market.

The specialty skill strategy usually requires the innovator to be first into the market, so that it can establish sufficient market penetration and branding before any competitor can step in, thereby dominating the market.

Like the toll-gate strategy, the specialty skill will live or die on the products or services it enables.

The Specialty Market Strategy of the Ecological Niche depends on the innovator spotting a market that is being ignored by other businesses.

The death of the specialty market is when it becomes a mass market. An example is the modern perfume market, first created by the French perfumery Coty after World War I, and originally targeted at the upper middle class sector; today, it has become a mass market with perfumes being sold at grocery stores.

[To be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

A SUMMARY OF THOUGHTS: INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP IV

[continued from the Last Post.]

(2) The next strategy, “Hit Them Where They Ain’t”, is a case of the follower of a market leader successfully exploiting the market leader’s innovation, to the detriment of the original innovator.

This strategy hits home as one of the major weaknesses of the “Fastest with the Mostest” strategy: the most innovative product without a market is a cost center, not a profit center.

Drucker cites as examples:

• IBM was a market follower within the Personal Computer market. The IBM PC was neither the first nor the most innovative, but the market that IBM pursued was the business market; meanwhile, Apple sought to dominate the educational market. IBM established itself with enduring prominence.

• The Hattori Company in Japan took a Swiss innovation, the quartz watch, and created a market winner with the Seiko brand. This was enabled by the Swiss shelving their new idea after demonstrating its feasibility.

• Sony, not in consumer electronics at the time, purchased a license for transistor technology from Bell Labs. Starting with cheap portable radios, she became a major player in the home electronics market.

Drucker lists five “fairly common bad habits that enable newcomers to use entrepreneurial judo and to catapult themselves into a leadership position in an industry.” These five habits, allowing competitors to use the “Hit Them Where They Ain’t” strategy, are:

• The Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome (the arrogance that leads a business or profession to believe that something new cannot be any good unless they themselves thought of it).

• The tendency to “cream” a market by staying in the high profit zone, with a concomitant tendency to keep costs high. This led to US automobile manufacturers permitting entry by Japanese auto makers into the low end of the auto market in the 1970’s, thereby providing the vital foothold the Japanese needed to become competitive throughout all segments of the US automobile market.

• Believing that quality is something a supplier puts into a product rather than understanding that quality is something that the consumer gets out of the product.

• The belief that the consumer will pay a premium price thereby keeping prices high, which in turn lures competitors into the market if the market entry barriers are sufficiently low.

• Maximizing rather than optimizing, a habit that contributed to the destruction of Burgmaster.

[To be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

A SUMMARY OF THOUGHTS: INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP III

[continued from the Last Post.]

The entrepreneurial strategies that Drucker identifies are:

• “Fastest with the Mostest”;

• “Hit Them Where They Ain’t”;

• Ecological Niches; and

• Changing Values and Characteristics;

Each of these strategies has advantages and disadvantages; they may also be combined to form hybrid strategies. Some of them are riskier than others. Market structures such as demographics, and economic conditions within the market, will certainly influence the potential for success with a particular strategy.

(1) As examples of “Fastest with the Mostest,” Drucker cites:

• the growth of the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-LaRoche, from its beginnings as a small chemical firm in the 1920’s, and

• the decision at DuPont to grow its plastics industry after the discovery of Nylon.

This strategy is also one of the riskiest because it appears so much like a gamble; insufficient resources may cause the strategy to fail.

Nylon was a commercial success, according to Drucker, because the negative impact of World War II on the Japanese silk industry protected the fledgling plastic fibre industry; it could thus become cost competitive by the time the silk industry rebuilt itself in the late 1940’s.

DuPont was able to follow up a technology innovation with the process innovations necessary to reduce costs, and thereby to keep the market built during the absence of silk from Japan.

[To be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

A SUMMARY OF THOUGHTS: INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP II

[continued from the Last Post.]

In the practice of entrepreneurship, Drucker embeds the innovating agency within an organization and tries to answer the question: “what kind of organization encourages and exploits innovation?”

Drucker looks at three types of organizations:

• the established private sector business;

• the established public sector service institution; and

• the new start up business;

The established private sector business, despite the prevailing idea of innovation only happening in new ventures, is the major wellspring of innovation.

The reasons for an established company spewing out innovation are:

• the established company usually has the financial resources as well as

• the knowledge base to innovate.

Unfortunately, established companies have a track record of not exploiting innovation; this situation is taken advantage of by disenfranchised employees opting to start their own enterprise around the spurned innovation.

Several organizations started by entrepreneurial founders have languished once the founders have left their companies; the innovative drive emerged solely from the efforts of those founders rather than from the existence of an organization-wide entrepreneurial culture.

Large established companies such as 3M and Procter & Gamble have built entrepreneurial management into their organizations. In both cases, innovation is expected and encouraged throughout the organization.

Both companies have established processes that encourage innovation and provide methods for employees to fund innovative efforts.

In an interesting sidebar, Drucker warns:

ACTION:

A non-innovative company, acquiring an innovative one, in the hope that the newly acquired company will inject it with a strong dose of innovation.

RESULT:

Usually results in failure of the objective, as well as the destruction of the acquired company.

EXAMPLE:

The acquisition of Burgmaster machine tools by Houdaille Industries in 1964 followed by a slow decline of Burgmaster until the liquidation of the its assets in 1986, as described in 'When the Machine Stopped: A Cautionary Tale from Industrial America' by Max Holland (1989).

[to be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

A SUMMARY OF THOUGHTS: INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP

According to management guru Peter Drucker, writing in his now classic, 'Innovation & Entrepreneurship: [Published in the mid-80's, this is the first book to present innovation & entrepreneurship as a purposeful and systematic discipline.]

• innovation & entrepreneurship are not limited to high technology industries.

Most innovation & entrepreneurship happens in low technology industries just as most job creation also comes from low technology industries.

• entrepreneurship is doing something differently so as to better use resources & expand markets for the product &/or service.

Ray Kroc took a hamburger stand in a single city and turned it into an international business, McDonalds, by applying innovation to his products, services, & marketing.

Ray Kroc was an entrepreneur. Someone else running that hamburger stand without Kroc’s entrepreneur spirit may have had a thriving hamburger business but it wouldn’t have been McDonalds & that person wouldn’t have been an entrepreneur, just another hamburger stand owner.

• entrepreneurship & innovation are not inborn characteristics. They are behaviors that most anyone who is willing to apply themselves can learn.

• innovation is “a bright idea” and maintains that dependable innovative ideas come from systematic exploration of the seven sources of innovative opportunity as follows:

- The Unexpected - composed of three areas of unexpected events: unexpected success, unexpected failure, unexpected outside event;

- Incongruities - a discrepancy or dissonance between what is and what ought to be or is assumed to be which is composed of four areas: economic realities of an industry (marketplace), other realities of an industry (optimization of local, non-essential areas rather than system optimization), customer expectations versus the industry perception of customer expectations, internal incongruity with a process;

- Process Need - a weak or missing link in a process that makes the process cheaper, easier, or possible (technologically possible or economically possible);

- Industry and Market Structures - changes in industry or market such as new competitors, new customers, more differentiated products, new manufacturing or marketing processes, new substitute or complementary products or services;

- Demographics - changes in population structure such as size, age structure, cultural composition, employment, education, & income;

- Changes in Perception - a change in the way that facts are perceived such as “the glass is half full” versus “the glass is half empty”;

- New Knowledge - the discovery of new knowledge which can be exploited such as a new technology or materials;

• entrepreneurs innovate.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

Innovation, indeed, creates a resource. There is no such thing as a resource until man finds a use for something in nature & then endows it with economic value. Until then, every plant is a weed and every mineral just another rock.

• The Do’s:

- Purposeful, systematic innovation begins with the analysis of the opportunities;

- Innovation is both conceptual & perceptual, analysis must be followed by testing of the analysis against reality;

- An innovation must be simple and focused because everything new runs into trouble;

- Effective innovations start small providing incremental changes which provide leverage for larger change;

- Effective innovations aim at leadership in a market or industry;

• The Don’ts:

- Don’t try to be clever;

- Don’t try to do too many things at once;

- Don’t try to innovate for the future even if the innovation lead time is long;

• The Conditions:

- Innovation is hard, focused, purposeful work requiring knowledge, experience, & ingenuity;

- Innovators must build on their strengths because of the risks of innovation & the costs of allocating knowledge & performance capacity to the innovative effort;

- Innovation affects the economy & society, requiring a change in the behavior of customers, so it has be close to the market, focused on the market, & market driven;

[To be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from the 'Lifescaping' seminar participant's manual. The 'Lifescaping' seminar is conducted by Dilip Mukerjea about four times a year under the auspices of the Singapore Institute of Management.]

HOW MUCH OF INNOVATION IS INSPIRATION & HOW MUCH IS HARD WORK?

According to management guru Peter Drucker, the answer to the foregoing question lies somewhere in the middle.

Nonetheless, he had added this brilliant observation or insight:

"But when all is said & done, what innovation requires is hard work: focused, purposeful work. If diligence, persistence & commitment are lacking, talent, ingenuity & knowledge are of no avail."

In a nut shell, successful innovation does require inspiration. But that's barely half of the equation. It also requires discipline: rigorous, systematic way to bring good ideas to profitable fruition.

Of course, balancing the inspiration/hardwork equation isn't going to be easy.

FROM DILIP MUKERJEA'S MINDMAP GALLERY

This is a hand-crafted mind map by Dilip Mukerjea of one of management guru Peter Drucker's superb classics? Do you know which one?

[All the images in this post are the intellectual property of Dilip Mukerjea.]

BOOK REVIEW: 'PETER DRUCKER SHAPING THE MANAGERIAL MIND', by John Flaherty

I have found it very refreshing to read again Peter Drucker's published thoughtwares!

Over the years since I started working as an engineer in the late sixties & also at different times in my life till now, I have read many of Peter Drucker's works on management, change, entrepreneurial endeavour & executive effectiveness.

I had bought this book just after it was published. What attracted me was firstly, the author's credentials:

He had followed Peter Drucker for over forty years & had kept notes on materials from Drucker's lectures, books, articles, conversations & correspondence. Secondly, the book had covered some sixty years of Drucker's thoughtwares.

I thought I could have access to further insights & new perspectives.

To my great delight, I have not been disappointed at all.

In the context of my own interests, I have found it very refreshing to re-read & attain a finer understanding of many important concepts.

Let me share some of my personal favourites with readers:

- Drucker talked about perception. He defined perception as seeing what everybody else had seen but ignored & thinking through what nobody else had thought through.

He observed that "people see what is presented to them; what is not presented tends to be "problems" - especially in the areas where performance skills falls below expectations - which means that managers tend not to see opportunities. They are simply not being presented with them."

[This reconciles in some way with the work of Edward de Bono, another great throught leader.

Please read his 'Opportunities: A Handbook of Business Opportunity Search'.]

- In dealing with the future, Drucker suggested thinking about the future in three classifications:

1) projection (the future that has already happened);

2) anticipation (the future that one expects to happen);

3) innovation (a systematic methodology for inventing the future);

[Many of the intellectual works from the World Future Society (WFS)'s members, nothwithstanding other consultants, are based essentially on these concepts.]

- Innovation is purposeful planned change, the sowing of seeds today for an entirely new & different business tomorrow;

[Many innovation consultants/authors have exploited this concept through their books & seminars.]

- Drucker provided an array of practical tactics for identifying entrepreneurial opportunities, namely:

1) the unexpected (success, failure, outside event);

2) incongruities;

3) demographics;

4) industry & market structure;

5) creative imitation;

6) entrepreneurial judo;

7) the ecological niche;

Frankly, I thought this author did a much better job than Drucker in enlightening me here!

[Michel Robert, a well-known international consultant in strategic thinking, readily exploited these concepts & even created a very successful proprietary methodology called 'Strategic Product Innovation Process', under Decision Processes International, which he founded in 1980.

Please read his book, 'Strategic Product Innovation, Pure & Simple' - it's precursor is 'Innovation Formula'.]

- Drucker maintained that inside a business were only costs, efforts, problems, frictions, & crises but never results. In seeking the source of business purpose, he concluded that it was the creation & satisfaction of the customer:

- in essence what has come to be known as the marketing concept;

- in the broadest sense, only marketing produced results; everything else in the business was cost.

Drucker argued strenously that there were no results inside the business, only costs; the outside factors of the customer & innovation were the crucial factors to performance & no business had control of them;

What I also like about this book is that it is filled with useful summaries & checklists of key lessons at the end of each chapter. The author must be complimented for doing a marvellous job.

Peter Drucker is undoubtedly the organisational thought leader of the 20th Century & our most significant contributor to the concepts of modern management & business strategy.

I concur that this book can serve as a practical crash course for first time readers who want to explore Peter Drucker's most profound discoveries in management, change, entrepreneurial endeavour, & executive effectiveness.

For all entrepreneur-wannabes out there, please read - & reread - this book.

Your effort & time will be well-spent & also ambly rewarded at the end of your exploration!

[Subsequently, I have also acquired & read 'Inside Drucker's Brain' (2007), by Jeffrey Krames, & 'A Class with Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher' (2008), by William Cohen. I will post my book reviews separately.]

BOOK REVIEW: 'DRIVING GROWTH THROUGH INNOVATION', by Robert Tucker

[Extracted from the 'Optimum Performance Technologies' weblog.]

Ever since reading 'Winning the Innovation Game' & also listening to the audio compilation, 'Innovative Secrets of Success', at the tail end of the eighties or so, I have always been impressed by the work of innovation strategist Robert Tucker.

In fact, I even had a brief fax correspondence with the author during the early nineties, during which he had generously offered me some additional valuable information.

I had also read his subsequent book, 'Managing the Future: 10 Driving Forces of Change', & its audio version, 'How to Profit from Today's Rapid Changes', as well as many of his other interesting articles in magazines, newsletters or on the web since then.

For me, after a perusal, 'Driving Growth through Innovation' seems more like an intellectual expansion of his earlier work, 'Winning the Innovation Game', with substantial refinement of the stuff he has spent the last twenty years in studying, researching & consulting.

From my personal perspective, 'Winning the Innovation Game' was a broad-brush of his findings from some 50 innovative companies during the early years.

In contrast, 'Driving Growth through Innovation' is a more in-depth analysis of the success factors of what he has designated as the 23 Innovation Vanguard companies. BMW is one of them.

What I like about the book so fondly is his artful blending & skillful machinations on how to master innovation as a "disciplined, systematic & repeatable process" in an organisation.

I certainly like his expressed belief in the Introduction, that "you'll grow as an individual in the process of mastering innovation".

That's to say, what applies in an organisational setting also works well in the personal setting, as far as the pursuit of innovation is concerned.

The author writes very eloquently & succinctly. The book is spiced with provoking questions & relevant strategy checklists.

In fact, I dare to say that very, very few innovation authors have adopted his innovative presentation style.

There are only 10 chapters, but he followed up - & peppered - each chapter of the book with "magical numbers", as follows:

Chapter 1: What It takes to Drive Growth:
5 essential practices that undergird business growth;

Chapter 2: Leading Innovation:
3 types of innovation; assessing your firm's Innovation Adeptness against 10 criteria;
6 most important leadership functions in building an all-enterprise innovation capability;

Chapter 3: Cultivating the Culture:
11 strategies designed to guide you in improving your firm's culture for greater innovation effectiveness;

Chapter 4: Fortifying the Idea Factory:
7 distinct methods of idea management,
plus 7 suggestions to guide you in designing & implementing a system;

plus 10 guidelines to keep in mind as you consider how best to empower the process;

Chapter 5: Mining the Future:
6 strategies innovation-adept firms are using to analyse trends;
3 critical components to developing your own future scan system;

Chapter 6: Filling the Idea Funnel:
6 strategies to ensure a steady stream of good ideas;

Chapter 7: Producing Powerful Products:
6 strategies to master the art of deriving business value from innovation;

Chapter 8: Generating Growth Strategies:
6 places to jump start your search for imaginative new business models for your firm;

[I like what he wrote: "Strategy innovation is, first & foremost, an act of imagination - the ability to see how something could work better from the customer's standpoint, in a way that in turn profits the sponsoring firm".]

Chapter 9: Selling New Ideas:
7 strategies for selling new ideas;

[Another good point from the author: "Innovation has always been about selling ideas".]

Chapter 10: Taking Action in Your Firm:
7 areas to look at prior to preparing an Innovation Initiative;

How do you like that? For me, that really makes perusal - & digestion - a breeze as you can zero into the brass tacks very quickly.

The author has focused primarily on what actually works, not fancy theories. Just pure insights from the battlefield trenches of 21st century innovators!

In spite of his two-decades' experience working with companies to improve innovation, the author has rightly & humbly admitted that he "rode on the shoulders of giants" in writing the book.

In this respect, I reckon that the author has fashioned his thinking as well as rethinking about strategy innovation from the work of Peter Drucker, who was the first among all the gurus out there to assert that "innovation is a disciplined, systematic & repeatable process".

To end this post, I would recommend reading Peter Drucker's 'Innovation & Entrepreneurship' as well as Michel Robert's 'Innovation Formula' as thought companions. They will certainly be worth your while.