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Four great innovations show why ideas are key to business. Everything else is ancillary

Peter Drucker claimed that any business had only two primary functions: marketing and innovation. I would extend that contention to not-for-profit organizations too. Essentially, anyone who is selling anything is in the business of generating ideas, then promoting them. The rest is mere details.

Let’s be honest. Many, perhaps all, of our innovations come from flashes of sudden inspiration. I seem to get an enormous number of such flashes on awaking in the morning, which tells me that my mind has been hard at work all night while I slept. Entrepreneur Joe Cossman was an unbelievably productive innovator who thought of so many products that it was a miracle he found the time and resources to pursue even a small percentage of them. But somehow he exploited enough to become extremely wealthy. Similar to Drucker, he worked mainly alone as a one-man band. Most of his innovations probably made him a million dollars or more every time he introduced one. A few failed. Yet his innovations’ success rate and his productivity were both excellent. The Cossman Ant Farm was one of his most successful and best known efforts…

Via David Hain

Trying to make the patterns of the 20th century serve for the 21st is futile. We need to recognise that for states, corporations and individuals alike there will be no return to “business as usual”.

 

Via Kenneth Mikkelsen

The world’s engines of progress are stuttering – but the world is still a much better place than in earlier times in history.

That is the view of Dr Richard Straub, president of the Peter Drucker Society Europe, of which Dialogue is media partner.

Straub used his opening address at the 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum, taking place this week in Vienna, to fire a warning to leaders and managers that growing inequalities, debt crises, climate change, aging populations and global conflicts are checking the incredible progress of humankind.

“The engines of progress are stuttering,” Straub said at the Forum, themed this year The Entrepreneurial Society. “We cannot rest on our laurels. We are increasingly fearful about technology: that it will destroy the fabric of society, making humans redundant and making machines take over.”

But in his opening letter to the Forum, Straub reminded delegates that in fact the history of technological innovation showed that it had been a key catalyst for improving the human condition. “The positive change we have experienced in just the past 250 years is astounding,” he wrote. “This unprecedented surge in income and improvement in living conditions for the masses… for sure comes down to human ingenuity, dramatically unleashed in key areas by technological breakthroughs and advances in governance.”

In a call to arms, Straub said in his address: “We have in our hands creative potential that is totally unprecedented in history. The challenge as managers is how can we manage this huge potential? I believe we have not even scratched the surface.”

Via David Hain