It’s a bit odd to read a book about innovation that’s thirty years old, but Peter Drucker’s definitive work holds up reasonably well. More than that, I think the main thrust of the book has not really been fully appreciated. The idea that entrepreneurship is a business activity that can be organized and managed in the same way as any other activity - accounting, say, or manufacturing - is still rather unorthodox today. Companies that systematically search for opportunities for change are few and far between, and those that practice well-disciplined entrepreneurial management and oversight rarer still. Actually, if anything, I think we’re seeing more and more attention given, both in the business press and in managerial policies themselves, to capturing “the bright idea” and lionizing the geniuses who develop them. Whether that’s a reflection of the American cult of individualism, or whether it’s an indictment of Drucker’s most important point, I don’t actually know. I do think that there are a lot of interesting ideas to be considered here, though; they are hard to implement, but probably worth the effort.

I would add that I found Drucker’s political insights to be rather thin, nearly laughable - his assessment of Jesse Jackson’s appeal, for instance, missed the mark in a lot of ways. Similarly, while Drucker makes pretenses at analyzing entrepreneurship in the public sector and for institutions of social good, and while he does seem to understand that not every institution can be run like a business, he seems to lack a fundamental understanding of why the constraints that face public service institutions make sense. At the end of the day, his prescriptions amount to little more than warmed-over neoliberal policies that exacerbate social inequality.