The Essential Drucker

There are four specifically 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 (Location 2295)

There is a great deal of talk today about the “midlife crisis” of the executive. It is mostly boredom. At age forty-five most executives have reached the peak of their business career and know it. After twenty years of doing very much the same kind of work, they are good at their jobs. But few are learning anything anymore, few are contributing anything anymore, and few expect the job again to become a challenge and a satisfaction. (Location 3919)

Three Answers for the Second Half of Life There are three answers. The first is actually to start a second and different career (Location 3929)

The second answer to the question of what to do with the second half of one’s life is to develop a parallel career. (Location 3940)

And then, finally—the third answer—there are the “social entrepreneurs.” These are usually people who have been very successful in their first profession, as businesspeople, as physicians, as consultants, as university professors. They love their work, but it no longer challenges them. In many cases they keep on doing what they have been doing all along, though they spend less and less of their time on it. But they start another, and usually a nonprofit, activity. (Location 3944)