Week 42 of 52. Welcome to Drucker Mondays, a 52-week journey through the new book, A Year with Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness, by Joseph A. Maciariello. Each Monday, we'll feature a Drucker fan and his or her favorite snippet from the week's topic. (Subscribe on this page.) Gordon Flinn is our guest writer today.
Week 42: Halftime Is an Entrepreneurial Enterprise
THE BIG IDEA FROM THE BOOK: Drucker’s lifework focused on the process of developing people with an overarching objective of social innovation. He observed that “Many of the pursuits of ‘Halftimers’ do result in social innovations that improve the lives of others in society.”
GORDON FLINN'S FAVORITE DRUCKER INSIGHT from Week 42, pages 330-335:
“Halftime is more like an entrepreneurial start-up company. One person sees a white space opportunity, raises angel capital, and builds a small team to complement the single entrepreneur.”
“The sequence is something like this:
(1) Aha! An idea.
(2) Launch a test market based on a hypothesis about customer value added.
(3) Prove the hypothesis—that there is a customer.
(4) Scale up—extend and expand with debt and risk capital.”
“Knowing one’s strengths, weakness, and values helps to narrow one’s set of opportunities for second-half entrepreneurial projects.”
GORDON FLINN'S COLOR COMMENTARY:
There is something inspiring and invigorating about shifting gears, the sounds of increasing RPMs, tackling an open road, discovering and navigating new landscapes. Halftime is that way, shifting from pursuing success and discovering the deeper drive and meaning of significance, and one’s purpose and/or legacy.
Drucker’s ability to recognize what most people don’t see and distill complex issues into memorable gems is remarkable and continues to be relevant today--decades later! I especially appreciated his insights on proactive systematic innovation. He noted, “Successful entrepreneurs do not wait until ‘the Muse kisses them’ and gives them a bright idea; they go to work.”
Drucker says systematic innovation includes leveraging seven sources for innovative opportunity:
(1) The unexpected success or unexpected failure
(2) The incongruity (“between reality as it actually is and reality as it is assumed to be…”)
(3) Innovation based on process need
(4) Changes in industry structure or market structure
Plus three changes outside the enterprise or industry:
(5) Demographics
(6) Changes in perception, mood, and meaning
(7) New knowledge (both scientific and nonscientific)
Amazing! Back in 1985, Peter Drucker observed the multiplying impact of knowledge, experience, leadership and management as keys to success. Perhaps more importantly, he saw their significance as drivers to make “the American economy into an entrepreneurial economy.”
THIS WEEK'S QUOTES & COMMENTARY BY GORDON FLINN:
Gordon Flinn’s “first half” included management and leadership experience at UPS, a small financial services company (LifeHelp) and in Christian higher education (Simpson University). Now as the founder and President/CEO at GoForth Consulting, his focus is providing value-driven growth working with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations to develop their mission capacity and effectiveness.
Areas of service include: organizational leadership/development, executive coaching, non-profit board leadership, strategy/planning, resource development/fundraising, marketing, succession planning, and project management. Email him at [email protected].
TO-DO TODAY:
“Think about possibilities for social entrepreneurship that fit your strengths and values.” Involve a family member or trusted colleague to quiz you on your strengths and core values—and what that might reveal about future opportunities.
Read Bob Buford's Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition), with a foreword by Jim Collins (published this month with more than 750,000 previously sold).
NEXT MONDAY:
On Oct. 26, 2015, watch for the color commentary on Week 43’s topic, “A Catalyst to Help People Manage Themselves and Move to the Second Half of Their Lives,” one of six chapters on “Developing Oneself from Success to Significance.”
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