Assignment 21A

I read Innovation and Entrepreneurship, by Peter Drucker.

1. The general theme of this book was to explain some of the methods that Drucker followed in his work. Essentially, this is the closest thing that he has ever come to explaining that exact methodology. One of the largest arguments that I see being posed throughout the book is the importance of change; it explains that some changes are good and others are bad, and that people/organizations must know how to utilize change.

2. There are many parellels that can be drawn between the book and the course. Two of the main ones that I saw were that both explained entrepreneurship to be something more and different than most people view it as and that it is important to look deep into the target audience for a company, into things as personal as demographics and political views in some areas.

3. I feel that the exercise that I would design would be one very similar to this one. By asking pointed questions about the book but giving people the option to read several different books both a) gives students some freedom to pick what they do the assignment on and b) allows each of us to get at least a little bit of up to three of the selected readings (the one we read for our initial post and the possibility of reading posts about at least two different readings from our peers).

4. The portion that I found to be the most interesting was the one discussing the different growth rates between large and medium sized companies. Though this reading is from over 30 years ago (it was written by Drucker in 1985), it explains that in that time the Fortune 500 companies were experiencing a steady decline in terms of employees that they had working for them, while 'mid-sized' companies were steadily becoming larger and creating new jobs, while paying their employees well and being profitable.