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Four quotes on Entrepreneurship from one of America's greatest Management gurus, Peter Drucker.
Pardon my digression. Back to Drucker. His book: "Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles" has some good snippets of wisdom on Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Here are a few I collected:
"Entrepreneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield. Of course, there is a risk they may not succeed. But if they are even moderately successful, the returns should be more than adequate to offset whatever risk there might be."
The second quote using the difference between MacDonalds and the little "moms & pops" delicatessen:
"The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture. McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is "value" to the customer?), standardizing the "product," designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship."
A third one on the entrepreneur being some sort of a rebel with a cause:
Finally, and this is so true if you are an entrepreneur :"Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society - and especially in the economy - as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. That is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur. It was intended as a manifesto and as a declaration of dissent: the entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes. As Joseph Schumpeter formulated it, his task is "creative destruction.""
"Entrepreneurship is "risky" mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing." (So true!)
