To me, the name Peter Drucker alludes to the world's master of management expertise and knowledge. Any book by or about Drucker, in my opinion, commands great respect, and this work by Cohen is no exception.
Drucker on Marketing is so full of his wisdom, as well as Cohen's intelligence on the matter so vast, that I would have to write an entire book about the book to do it a just review.
For those unenlightened (though I cannot imagine who) Drucker penned 32 books, wrote 30 essays for Harvard Business Review, and was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal for 20 years. A Forbes article by the same title named him “The father of 21st century management” and yet, I am supposed to do Cohen's book justice in a mere 1,000 words?
Drucker on Management is broken up into five sections:
The ascendancy of marketing.
Innovation and entrepreneurship.
Drucker's marketing strategy.
New product and service introduction.
Drucker's unique marketing insights.
Being an entrepreneur at heart myself, I was particularly intrigued by the second section aptly named after Drucker's 1985 book of the same title, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The section has four chapters, all of which I found pertinent. Since Drucker felt that everyone needed to be an entrepreneur, I thought I would focus some retrospective on that.
Cohen names a chapter “Demand-side innovation,“ and he expertly lays out Drucker's take on the subject. Cohen opens the chapter by saying, “Demand-side innovation involves purposefully working toward a predetermined goal. Something demands a solution, and frequently this involves innovation.” (p. 63). Cohen then covers Drucker's approach to this type of creativeness naming several of his methods of “systematic innovation.”
A few of these approaches include “The left and right brain solutions”, and the “Dos and don'ts of systematic innovation”. Cohen includes several relevant examples including how the British turned to US industrialist Henry Kaiser to streamline production of merchant ships during the Second World War.
Supply-Side innovation, as Cohen put it, “…is innovation based primarily on capability in which the originally intended objective becomes secondary to actual, and usually unexpected, results. (p. 74) For an analogy he points again to a WW II example where GE engineer, James Wright, was working on the demand side in that Japan controlled most of the world's rubber, yet the rest of the world needed it for tires for their own vehicles. Inadvertently, GE's engineer invented Silly-Putty which had no practical use at the time.
Note that, as the book emphasizes, both methods require equally high degrees organized, systematic, and rational work. (p. 74)
On the marketing side of entrepreneurship (Chapter 9), Cohen covers more on Drucker's work; Innovation and Entrepreneurship. In that work Drucker provided four entrepreneurial marketing strategies:
Dominance of a new market or industry.
Development of a currently underserved market.
Finding and occupying a specialized “ecological niche.”.
Changing the economic characteristics of a product, a market, or an industry (p. 86).
The techniques I can see as being essential both to entrepreneurs as well as industry giants. Cohen gives readers Drucker's variety of methods, and simply as an example of the many (because a detailed expansion on them length doesn't permit) he talks about developing new markets by providing a product's or service's missing ingredient.
Drucker indicated “hitting them where they ain't.” This can best be explained as a marketing friend of mine, Ron Baron, (not to be confused with the Forbes listed billionaire) from www.AnInspiredLife.net recently explained to me that one must look to what your competitors are not doing then create a new demand based on that knowledge. Drucker, is now and shall always be timely, long after his passing in 2005 at the ripe age of 95.
The section, “Drucker's marketing strategy” opens with a chapter titled after perhaps arguably the most profound “Druckerism” of all time: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” With that in mind, ironically, Drucker said that the future is an unknown and that it will be different from what one expects. However, if he was alive today, one could almost hear Peter saying, “one could predict future effects of events that have already occurred.” (p. 100). The second reasoning in predicting the future, Drucker states that while making a future happen is risky and difficult, it's not as risky and as difficult as doing nothing.
One can wildly imagine the strategic advantages a marketer would have if they were able to predict the future as Drucker often succeeded, and in Chapter 10, Cohen arms the reader with Drucker's wisdom, eloquently passing it on to, I hope, an eager audience.
The section concludes with Chapter 14, “Marketing and selling are not complimentary and may be adversarial”, which contains a sub-section called “Strategy is more important than tactics” which I found the most insightful point of the book. Cohen quotes once Sears CEO Robert Wood as saying, “business is like war in one respect – if its grand strategy is correct, any number of tactical errors can be made, and yet the enterprise proves successful.” (p. 145) Then Cohen nails the sub-section's point home by saying, “Unfortunately, the reverse is not true. If the tactics are correct, they can't make an erroneous strategy successful.” (p. 145) More to the point, if the marketing strategy is well developed, poor sales tactics will not necessarily deep-six a product or service, but if the strategy is at fault, there are no sales methods that will lead to salvation.
Cohen closes the book with a final chapter titled With Drucker into the Future. The father of modern management named today's “knowledge worker” birthed the idea of creating value for customers, advocated for marketing's roll in corporate responsibility, moved the worker from liability to asset, cemented the association between innovation and entrepreneurship, and foretold globalization.
Overall, I found every section of the book useful, insightful, and pertinent. I love a good business book and Drucker on Marketing is like a suspenseful page-turner for the avid business reader. Peter Drucker was (and is) read by the world's most powerful leaders. His multiple awards include The Presidential Medal of Freedom given to him by George W. Bush in 2002. Drucker will live on today and for future generations. Cohen's work provides important and powerful perspectives of this amazing master of marketing. Truly a great read!
