Essay on Being Praised As The Worlds

Submitted By HazelVon
Words: 869
Pages: 4

Being praised as “the world’s greatest management thinker” and “the father of modern management”, Peter Drucker, in The New Venture, describes four requirements for entrepreneurial management: market focus, sound financial foresight, development of a top management team and a flexible mindset for the founding entrepreneur. Drucker’s ideas reflects the teaching methods of Louis Agassiz and the ultimate success of HP can be mostly attributed to Hewlett’s and Packard’s adherence to the Professor Drucker’s requirement. The situation faced by an entrepreneur in a new venture and the students of Louis Agassiz’s are similar: they are to develop or to find something valuable from a limited pool of resources. A starting up entrepreneur is likely to be in the position with limited funds or recognition; similarly, the student of Agassiz’s, Shaler and Scudder, are left alone to develop observations on fish without tools, assistance, or any documents. Agassiz’s method forced his students to take on the role of an “academia entrepreneur”. As a result, the students learned not only to observe every detail closely, but also to try different things and embrace each dead-end as a learning experience rather than a waste of time. Entrepreneurs are also intrinsically driven to pursue ever-greater goals. Similarly, Agassiz added more fish and encouraged the student to continually develop his expertise as he mastered observational skills. Nonetheless, the entrepreneur, like the student, has to be focused to perform reasonable activity to make the company strive. The four requirements proposed by Drucker served as guidelines for Hewlett and Packard’s young company. The first one, to have a clear market focus, requires the entrepreneurs not to rely on flawed market research or predetermined expectations but to embrace the needs of the market and possibility that the product can be used in a different way. HP maintained its focus as a high-tech venture by first listening to the need from fellow engineers sitting at the next bench – which helped HP understand its market needs in its early days - and then by "building a group of complementary products rather than becoming involved in a lot of unrelated things." It only makes product really makes contributions that is the product of a new market where no dominant company was there before them. This strategy also helped HP to reduce the damage the company may experience when the revenue declined by a 50 percent after the World War II. Drucker’s second requirement, sound financial foresight, helped secure the stability of the company. A well-informed and decisive financial foresight is critical; fast-growing companies without a detailed plan can easily outstrip their financial means. HP, unlike its competitor companies at that time such as Texas Instruments, maintained a control of its growth. It didn’t make the increase of its profits or quick expansion as the first priority. Instead, it conservatively re-invested in its new product development so that the financial situation of the company is stable and with new products showing up, the company grew in a healthy way. Besides, HP was unwilling to loan money from banks after they saw the consequences of long term debts. Even in the very moment that company could barely pay its employees’ salary, HP refused to accept long term loans so that Hewlett and Packard still “own” the company rather than becoming employees for the banks that loan