Entrepreneurial Strategies
In this chapter, Peter Drucker presents four different entrepreneurial strategies. He starts pointing out that entrepreneurial strategies are as important for any business as entrepreneurial management is. He states that despite this fact there is almost no discussion about entrepreneurial strategies, despite their distinctive influence to the success of any business. Drucker distinguishes between entrepreneurial management, that is, practices and policies within the enterprise, and entrepreneurial strategies, that is, practices and policies outside. "Outside the enterprise" is understood as the marketplace the firm operates in. The author proposes four specific entrepreneurial strategies: 1. "Being fustest with the mostest" 2. "Hitting them where they ain't" 3. Finding and occupying a specialized "ecological niche" 4. Changing the economic characteristics of a product, a market or an industry The way Drucker calls these four strategies is evidently very methaphorical, almost a bit poetical, and it already gives an implicit, summed up explanation what these strategies are about. The author then goes into details and special characteristics of each of these strategies, with special focus on risks and opportunities. He supports his conclusions with a lot of examples from economic life, namely the success stories or failures of often well-known enterprises. One might easily find that the way corporations behave in the marketplace can be compared to the way animals behave in "wild" nature, as expressions like "finding an ecological niche" may suggest. Indeed, this interpretation is endorsed by the way Drucker describes the features of these strategies, sometimes, he even explicitly draws that comparison to biology. We will now have a closer look at each of the four strategies. "Being Fustest with the Mostest" As the naming suggests, this strategy is mainly defined by trying to become the unchallenged leader in an economic field. Drucker observes that this is sometimes