Innovation and entrepreneurship: practice and principles.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg

Peter F. Drucker. Harper & Row, $19.95. Cold type, word processors, chainstore marketing and the like are beginning to make publishing resemble farming--burdened by overproduction. As we currently have too much wheat, we have too many books, at least two many books just like other books. The latest effort from Peter F. Drucker, a management professor who has been writing on economics for 45 years and who contributes an insightful column to The Wall Street Journal, will disappoint his fans. Not that Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a bad book; it's just that it's been written already, several times. Drucker's "Seven Sources for Innovative Opportunity" and four "Entrepreneurial Strategies" will seem hauntingly familiar to readers of the genre. If this book were upland cotton, it would go straight into storage.

Drucker plows some well-tilled earth, then buries the reader under more rules, regulations, and aphorisms than any human being could possibly act on. One brief chapter on the principles of innovation consists of five "do's"--"A successful innovation aims at leaderships"--three "don'ts"--"Don't try to innovate for the future! Innovate for the present!"--and three "conditions"--"Two. To succeed, innovators must build on their strengths." (Italics from the original; in business how-to manuals it seems to more obvious the statement, the louder the drumroll.) Though originally a journalist, Drucker does not buttress his arguments with reporting, interviews, or specific case studies. Instead, all manner of historical characters are called on to back up assertions, among them Roger Bacon, William Jennings Bryan, Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Dickens, Ben FRanklin, Warren G. Harding, Lillian Hellman, Nicolo Machiavelli, Mao Ze Dong, Gregor Mendel, Napoleon Bonaparte, Bertrand Russell, Madame de Sevigne, Jules Verne, and Alfred North Whitehead. Then, in an afterword, Drucker has the nerve to put down other volumes on entrepreneurship for being "anecdotal."

The book's conclusion declares that America is on the verge of a monumental "revolutionary" shift from a managerial society to an Entrepreneurial Society. Precious little indication is given of what an Entrepreneurial...