Innovation and Entrepreneurship - Peter F. Drucker
I'm currently on vacation with my family and brought along a few books to read. To minimize the usual at-home distractions (aside from the books), I don't take my laptop with me on family trips, but I do keep my iPhone on me (which ultimately may be more distracting). Without access to Photoshop, I have relied upon my iPhone camera and a handful of iPhone apps to produce some (in my opinion) pretty decent images. Consider this entry a dispatch from the field. Drucker is the management guru's guru, and everyone who's involved in business should spend time reading some of his seminal works. In this book, written over twenty years ago, Drucker dispells the romantic notion of the innovator as a risk-taking maverick with grandiose visions; rather, the most successful innovators are those who humbly listen and purposefully search for changes and innovative opportunities. Through a number of case studies, Drucker also illustrates how our tendency to associate innovation with new technology can be flawed, and how many of the innovations with the greatest impact have been social innovations. After laying out his principles and practices for innovation, Drucker then devotes the latter half of the book to clarifying the meaning of entrepreneurship. This part is also very important because any innovative venture without entrepreneurial management is almost sure to fail. If only Thomas Edison had learned this lesson. . . .


