Today’s certainties always become tomorrow’s absurdities.
One thing is certain for developed countries—and probably for the entire world—we face long years of profound changes. An organization must be organized for constant change. It will no longer be possible to consider entrepreneurial innovation as lying outside of management or even as peripheral to management. Entrepreneurial innovation will have to become the very heart and core of management. The organization’s function is entrepreneurial, to put knowledge to work—on tools, products, and processes; on the design of work; on knowledge itself.
Deliberate emphasis on innovation may be needed most where technological changes are least spectacular. Everyone in a pharmaceutical company knows that the company’s survival depends on its ability to replace three quarters of its products by entirely new ones every ten years. But how many people in an insurance company realize that the company’s growth—perhaps even its survival—depends on the development of new forms of insurance? The less spectacular or prominent technological change is in a business, the greater the danger that the whole organization will ossify, and the more important, therefore, is the emphasis on innovation.
ACTION POINT: Are you and your organization in danger of ossification? Decide how you and your organization can systematically innovate, and build this into your management process.
Managing in a Time of Great Change
The Practice of Management
The Ecological Vision
Management Challenges for the 21st Century
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker