Businesses have only Two Functions...
Druckers’ wisdom applied to modern-day business design and entrepreneurship.
How do you know when you have product market fit and a tight value proposition? In his inimitable style, Peter Drucker puts it best:
(The Essential Drucker)
Still so relevant today, his quotes also apply to value chain analysis and finding opportunities to disrupt with (Digital) technology and innovation:
“The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.” (Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles)
Drucker was born in 1909 and yet I feel would have been quite aligned with design thinking, already preaching one of its core tenets in 1970:
“We are becoming aware that major questions regarding technology are not technical but human questions.”
And to cap it off, Drucker was also aligned to customer-centric thinking:
“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”