I’ve written elsewhere about how certain powerful words and phrases get overly used in business because they sound ‘windswept and interesting’ (as Billy Connolly would say). I would include the word entrepreneur in my list. It just sounds more glamorous and exciting than businessperson, founder, or owner. The original definition of entrepreneur, provided by the French economist J.B. Say, is ironically quite dull: Someone who moves resources from an area of low yield to one of higher yield. Dull, but useful. We’ll come back to it at the end.

Peter Drucker was one of the most sought-after management consultants of the 20th century. Forbes magazine described him as “the founder of modern management”. And The Financial Times once called him the “world’s most respected thinker and writer on management”. Let me share three of Drucker’s powerful ideas about the entrepreneur.

First, entrepreneurship is not a mysterious art driven by instinct and relying on some inspired flash of genius. It is a discipline. Successful entrepreneurs constantly and purposefully search for changes that might provide market opportunities to exploit. The change might be a technological breakthrough. But, as any MBA student or strategy consultant knows, it could equally be political, economic, sociological, legal or environmental. (Ref: The PESTLE model).

Second, there is a diverse range of successful approaches to entrepreneurship. At one end, there is moving quickly with the intention of creating and totally dominating a new market. Think Amazon and Apple. At the other end, there is the approach of waiting, evaluating, and then imitating existing products with something significantly different that better meets a market’s needs. Think IBM and Microsoft.

Third, entrepreneurs should narrowly focus on the specific needs of that market and work back to their solution. They should then choose the most appropriate approach to exploit that market opportunity. Apple and Microsoft do this very well but in totally different ways (see above). And they are the two most valuable companies in the world.

Returning to that definition of an entrepreneur. I’ve written separately about the re-allocation of resources being the most useful decision in strategy. That, according to J.B. Say, is entrepreneurship. And, I’ve proposed McKinsey’s Three Horizons model as the most useful tool in strategy because it helps to plan those re-allocations. So, please see those separate articles for practical help in putting Drucker’s powerful ideas into practice.