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Introduction 17

needed and have greater impact on the small entrepreneurial organi-
zation than it has in the big “managed” one. Above all, management,
we are learning now, has as much to contribute to the new, the entre-
preneurial enterprise, as to the existing, ongoing “managerial” one.
To take a specific example, hamburger stands have been around in
the United States since the nineteenth century; after World War II
they sprang up on big-city street corners. But in the McDonald’s ham-
burger chain—one of the success stories of the last twenty-five
years—management was being applied to what had always been a
hit-and-miss, mom-and-pop operation. McDonald’s first designed the
end product; then it redesigned the entire process of making it; then
it redesigned or in many cases invented the tools so that every piece
of meat, every slice of onion, every bun, every piece of fried potato
would be identical, turned out in a precisely timed and fully auto-
mated process. Finally, McDonald’s studied what “value” meant to
the customer, defined it as quality and predictability of product, speed
of service, absolute cleanliness, and friendliness, then set standards
for all of these, trained for them, and geared compensation to them.
All of which is management, and fairly advanced management at
that.
Management is the new technology (rather than any specific new
science or invention) that is making the American economy into an
entrepreneurial economy. It is also about to make America into an
entrepreneurial society. Indeed, there may be greater scope in the
United States—and in developed societies generally—for social
innovation in education, health care, government, and politics than
there is in business and the economy. And again, entrepreneurship in
society—and it is badly needed—requires above all application of the
basic concepts, the basic techné, of management to new problems and
new opportunities.
This means that the time has now come to do for entrepreneurship
and innovation what we first did for management in general some
thirty years ago: to develop the principles, the practice, and the disci-
pline.