Drucker wrote the book on innovation - All About Drucker

Information Outlook, March, 2002 by Bruce Rosenstein

In 1985, Peter Drucker published the seminal Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles, codifying ideas for a discipline that seemed to exist only as a seat-of-the-pants, go-by-your-gut endeavor. He describes and analyzes such entrepreneurial innovations as the development of the modern newspaper and radical entities such as Nylon and penicillin.

He also shows the key ingredients Ray Kroc used to turn McDonald's from a 1950s hamburger stand into a classic case of entrepreneurship.

The keynote speaker at the 2002 Special Libraries Association annual conference in Los Angeles this June continues to focus on these fields 15 years after the release of his book.

The latest book in The Drucker Foundation's Wisdom to Action Series is Leading For Innovation and Organizing for Results, with thoughtful essays by an all-star lineup including Howard Gardner, Margaret J. Wheatley and James Burke.

In the foreword, Frances Hesselbein, one of the co-editors and the chairman of the board of governors of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, writes that in 1991, while preparing for the foundation's first conference, she asked Drucker for his definition of innovation. She wanted a description that could be used as a guiding theme for their materials. After some thought, Drucker faxed back this reply: "Innovation: change that creates a new dimension of performance."

In Management Challenges for the 21st Century, published in 1999, he reiterates his long-held belief that management and entrepreneurship are inseparable: "An enterprise, whether a business or any other institution, that does not innovate and does not engage in entrepreneurship will not survive long."

Both must be managed and put to work. They are not weekend endeavors, or something you perform when you have nothing better to do. They are only partially a matter of analyzing reports and statistics. At some point, you must go out into the field and observe by yourself, and draw the right conclusions.

If what you are doing is not something radically transformed, you are not an entrepreneur and you are not innovating. And he reminds us that we must continually keep the needs and wants of the customer in mind.

SLA members can learn a lot from these practices and principles. Entrepreneurship is now taught in library schools and there have been countless books on these subjects in the last decade and a half. And we can help those we work with be more innovative and entrepreneurial. People working as researchers or as knowledge brokers can think of themselves as solo entrepreneurs.

Keeping in mind the SLA's motto of "putting knowledge to work," we can look to Drucker's comment in Innovation and Entrepreneurship that "Knowledge-based innovation is the 'super-star' of entrepreneurship." He writes that this type of innovation "differs from all other innovations in its basic characteristics: time span, casualty rate, predictability, and in the challenges it poses to the entrepreneur. And like most 'superstars,' knowledge-based innovation is temperamental, capricious, and hard to manage."

There is nothing necessarily magical about performing as an entrepreneur. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship he writes, "The best proof that entrepreneurship is a question of behavior, policies, and practices rather than personality is the growing number of older large-company people in the United States who make entrepreneurship their second career."

SLA members are prime candidates to transform Drucker's ideas into careers and institutions that take our talents and careers to new, unsuspected heights.

Bruce Rosenstein is a librarian at USA TODAY and an adjunct professor at The Catholic University School of Library and Information Science. He can be reached at brosenstein@usatoday.com.

Selected Bibliography:

The Essential Drucker (HarperCollins, 2001)

Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles (HarperBusiness, 1985)

Leading for Innovation and Organizing For Results: Drucker Foundation Wisdom to Action Series, edited by Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith and lain Somerville (Jossey-Bass, 2002)

Management Challenges for the 21st Century (HarperBusiness, 1999)

Managing for Results (HarperBusiness, 1964)