discussion
Reading(s): Drucker: Ch. 6 [76-87]; Chs. 11-12 [133-146]; Aulet: Step 1
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Choose from one or more of the following:
1. What did you find interesting about this week’s readings? Be specific.
2. What in the readings have you experienced or heard an anecdote about – does it support / reinforce or qualify / call into question any aspect of the readings?
3. What other comments, questions or perspectives do you have about this week’s readings? Again, be specific.
DISCUSSION GUIDELINES
Aim for a brief but substantive discussion (150 to 250 words). You can do any combination of the following:
A – Making a new observation by starting a new discussion thread
Peter F. Drucker
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Practice and Principles
2
Contents
Preface
Introduction: The Entrepreneurial Economy
I. The Practice of Innovation
1. Systematic Entrepreneurship
2. Purposeful Innovation and the Seven Sources for Innovative
Opportunity
3. Source: The Unexpected
4. Source: Incongruities
5. Source: Process Need
6. Source: Industry and Market Structures
7. Source: Demographics
8. Source: Changes in Perception
9. Source: New Knowledge
10. The Bright Idea
11. Principles of Innovation
II. The Practice of Entrepreneurship
12. Entrepreneurial Management
13. The Entrepreneurial Business
14. Entrepreneurship in the Service Institution
15. The New Venture
III. Entrepreneurial Strategies
16. Fustest with the Mostest
3
17. Hit Them Where They Aint
18. Ecological Niches
19. Changing Values and Characteristics
Conclusion: The Entrepreneurial Society
Suggested Readings
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Peter F. Drucker
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
4
Preface
This book presents innovation and entrepreneurship as a practice and a
discipline. It does not talk of the psychology and the character traits of
entrepreneurs; it talks of their actions and behavior. It uses cases, but
primarily to exemplify a point, a rule, or a warning, rather than as
success stories. The work thus differs, in both intention and execution,
from many of the books and articles on innovation and entrepreneurship
that are being published today. It shares with them the belief in the
importance of innovation and entrepreneurship. Indeed, it considers the
emergence of a truly entrepreneurial economy in the United States
during the last ten to fifteen years the most significant and hopeful event
to have occurred in recent economic and social history. But whereas
much of todays discussion treats entrepreneurship as something slightly
mysterious, whether gift, talent, inspiration, or flash of genius, this book
represents innovation and entrepreneurship as purposeful tasks that can
be organizedare in need of being organizedand as systematic work.
It treats innovation and entrepreneurship, in fact, as part of the
executives job.
This is a practical book, but it is not a how-to book. Instead, it deals
with the what, when, and why; with such tangibles as policies and
decisions; opportunities and risks; structures and strategies; staffing,
compensation, and rewards.
Innovation and entrepreneurship are discussed under three main
headings: The Practice of Innovation; The Practice of Entrepreneurship;
and Entrepreneurial Strategies. Each of these is an aspect of
innovation and entrepreneurship rather than a stage.
Part I on the Practice of Innovation presents innovation alike as
purposeful and as a discipline. It shows first where and how the
entrepreneur searches for innovative opportunities. It then discusses the
Dos and Donts of developing an innovative idea into a viable business
or service.
Part II, The Practice of Entrepreneurship, focuses on the institution
that is the carrier of innovation. It deals with entrepreneurial
management in three areas: the existing business; the public-service
institution; and the new venture. What are the policies and practices that
5
enable an institution, whether business or public-service, to be a
successful entrepreneur? How does one organize and staff for
entrepreneurship? What are the obstacles, the impediments, the traps,
the common mistakes? The section concludes with a discussion of
individual entrepreneurs, their roles and their decisions.
Finally, Part III, Entrepreneurial Strategies, talks of bringing an
innovation successfully to market. The test of an innovation, after all, lies
not its novelty, its scientific content, or its cleverness. It lies in its success
in the marketplace.
These three parts are flanked by an Introduction that relates
innovation and entrepreneurship to the economy, and by a Conclusion
that relates them to society.
Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice. It
has a knowledge base, of course, which this book attempts to present in
organized fashion. But as in all practices, medicine, for instance, or
engineering, knowledge in entrepreneurship is a means to an end.
Indeed, what constitutes knowledge in a practice is largely defined by
the ends, that is, by the practice. Hence a book like this should be
backed by long years of practice.
My work on innovation and entrepreneurship began thirty years ago,
in the mid-fifties. For two years, then, a small group met under my
leadership at the Graduate Business School of New York University
every week for a long evenings seminar on Innovation and
Entrepreneurship. The group included people who were just launching
their own new ventures, most of them successfully. It included mid-
career executives from a wide variety of established, mostly large
organizations: two big hospitals; IBM and General Electric; one or two
major banks; a brokerage house; magazine and book publishers;
pharmaceuticals; a worldwide charitable organization; the Catholic
Archdiocese of New York and the Presbyterian Church; and so on.
The concepts and ideas developed in this seminar were tested by its
members week by week during those two years in their own work and
their own institutions. Since then they have been tested, validated,
refined, and revised in more than twenty years of my own consulting
work. Again, a wide variety of institutions has been involved. Some were
businesses, including high-tech ones such as pharmaceuticals and
6
computer companies; no-tech ones such as casualty insurance
companies; world-class banks, both American and European; one-man
startup ventures; regional wholesalers of building products; and
Japanese multinationals. But a host of nonbusinesses also were
included: several major labor unions; major community organizations
such as the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. or C.A.R.E., the international relief
and development cooperative; quite a few hospitals; universities and
research labs; and religious organizations from a diversity of
denominations.
Because this book distills years of observation, study, and practice, I
was able to use actual mini-cases, examples and illustrations both of
the right and the wrong policies and practices. Wherever the name of an
institution is mentioned in the text, it has either never been a client of
mine (e.g., IBM) and the story is in the public domain, or the institution
itself has disclosed the story. Otherwise organizations with whom I have
worked remain anonymous, as has been my practice in all my
management books. But the cases themselves report actual events and
deal with actual enterprises.
Only in the last few years have writers on management begun to pay
much attention to innovation and entrepreneurship. I have been
discussing aspects of both in all my management books for decades.
Yet this is the first work that attempts to present the subject in its entirety
and in systematic form. This is surely a first book on a major topic rather
than the last wordbut I do hope it will be accepted as a seminal work.
Claremont, California
Christmas 1984
7
Introduction: The Entrepreneurial Economy
I
Since the mid-seventies, such slogans as the no-growth economy, the
deindustrialization of America, and a long-term Kondratieff stagnation
of the economy have become popular and are invoked as if axioms. Yet
the facts and figures belie every one of these slogans. What is
happening in the United States is something quite different: a profound
shift from a managerial to an entrepreneurial economy.
In the two decades 1965 to 1985, the number of Americans over
sixteen (thereby counted as being in the work force under the
conventions of American statistics) grew by two-fifths, from 129 to 180
million. But the number of Americans in paid jobs grew in the same
period by one-half, from 71 to 106 million. The labor force growth was
fastest in the second decade of that period, the decade from 1974 to
1984, when total jobs in the American economy grew by a full 24 million.
In no other peacetime period has the United States created as many
new jobs, whether measured in percentages or in absolute numbers.
And yet the ten years that began with the oil shock in the late fall of
1973 were years of extreme turbulence, of energy crises, of the near-
collapse of the smokestack industries, and of two sizable recessions.
The American development is unique. Nothing like it has happened
yet in any other country. Western Europe during the period 1970 to 1984
actually lost jobs, 3 to 4 million of them. In 1970, western Europe still had
20 million more jobs than the United States; in 1984, it had almost 10
million less. Even Japan did far less well in job creation than the United
States. During the twelve years from 1970 through 1982, jobs in Japan
grew by a mere 10 percent, that is, at less than half the U.S. rate.
But Americas performance in creating jobs during the seventies and
early eighties also ran counter to what every expert had predicted
twenty-five years ago. Then most labor force analysts expected the
economy, even at its most rapid growth, to be unable to provide jobs for
all the boys of the baby boom who were going to reach working age in
the seventies and early eightiesthe first large cohorts of baby boom
babies having been born in 1949 and 1950. Actually, the American
economy had to absorb twice that number. Forsomething nobody
8
even dreamed of in 1970married women began to rush into the labor
force in the mid-seventies. The result is that today, in the mid-eighties,
every other married woman with young children holds a paid job,
whereas only one out of every five did so in 1970. And the American
economy found jobs for these, too, in many cases far better jobs than
women had ever held before.
And yet everyone knows that the seventies and early eighties were
periods of no growth, of stagnation and decline, of a deindustrializing
America, because everyone still focuses on what were the growth areas
in the twenty-five years after World War II, the years that came to an end
around 1970.
In those earlier years, Americas economic dynamics centered in
institutions that were already big and were getting bigger: the Fortune
500, that is, the countrys largest businesses; governments, whether
federal, state, or local; the large and super-large universities; the large
consolidated high school with its six thousand or more students; and the
large and growing hospital. These institutions created practically all the
new jobs provided in the American economy in the quarter century after
World War II. And in every recession during this period, job loss and
unemployment occurred predominantly in small institutions and, of
course, mainly in small businesses.
But since the late 1960s, job creation and job growth in the United
States have shifted to a new sector. The old job creators have actually
lost jobs in these last twenty years. Permanent jobs (not counting
recession unemployment) in the Fortune 500 have been shrinking
steadily year by year since around 1970, at first slowly, but since 1977 or
1978 at a pretty fast clip. By 1984, the Fortune 500 had lost permanently
at least 4 to 6 million jobs. And governments in America, too, now
employ fewer people than they did ten or fifteen years ago, if only
because the number of schoolteachers has been falling as school
enrollment dropped in the wake of the baby bust of the early sixties.
Universities grew until 1980; since then, employment there has been
declining. And in the early eighties, even hospital employment stopped
increasing. In other words, we have not in fact created 35 million new
jobs; we have created 40 million or more, since we had to offset a
permanent job shrinkage of at least 5 million jobs in the traditional
employing institutions. And all these new jobs must have been created
by small and medium-sized institutions, most of them small and medium-
9
sized businesses, and a great many of them, if not the majority, new
businesses that did not even exist twenty years ago. According to The
Economist, 600,000 new businesses are being started in the United
States every year nowabout seven times as many as were started in
each of the boom years of the fifties and sixties.
II
Ah, everybody will say immediately, high tech. But things are not
quite that simple. Of the 40 million-plus jobs created since 1965 in the
economy, high technology did not contribute more than 5 or 6 million.
High tech thus contributed no more than smokestack lost. All the
additional jobs in the economy were generated elsewhere. And only one
or two out of every hundred new businessesa total of ten thousand a
yearare remotely high-tech, even in the loosest sense of the term.
We are indeed in the early stages of a major technological
transformation, one that is far more sweeping than the most ecstatic of
the futurologists yet realize, greater even than Megatrends or Future
Shock. Three hundred years of technology came to an end after World
War II. During those three centuries the model for technology was a
mechanical one: the events that go on inside a star such as the sun.
This period began when an otherwise almost unknown French physicist,
Denis Papin,
*
envisaged the steam engine around 1680. They ended
when we replicated in the nuclear explosion the events inside a star. For
these three centuries advance in technology meantas it does in
mechanical processesmore speed, higher temperatures, higher
pressures. Since the end of World War II, however, the model of
technology has become the biological process, the events inside an
organism. And in an organism, processes are not organized around
energy in the physicists meaning of the term. They are organized
around information.
There is no doubt that high tech, whether in the form of computers or
telecommunication, robots on the factory floor or office automation,
biogenetics or bioengineering, is of immeasurable qualitative
importance. High tech provides the excitement and the headlines. It
creates the vision for entrepreneurship and innovation in the community,
and the receptivity for them. The willingness of young, highly trained
people to go to work for small and unknown employers rather than for
10
the giant bank or the worldwide electrical equipment maker is surely
rooted in the mystique of high techeven though the overwhelming
majority of these young people work for employers whose technology is
prosaic and mundane. High tech also probably stimulated the
astonishing transformation of the American capital market from near-
absence of venture capital as recently as the mid-sixties to near-surplus
in the mid-eighties. High tech is thus what the logicians used to call the
ratio cognoscendi, the reason why we perceive and understand a
phenomenon rather than the explanation of its emergence and the cause
of its existence.
Quantitatively, as has already been said, high tech is quite small still,
accounting for not much more than one-eighth of the new jobs. Nor will it
become much more important in terms of new jobs within the near
future. Between now and the year 2000, no more than one-sixth of the
jobs we can expect to create in the American economy will be high-tech
jobs in all likelihood. In fact, if high tech were, as most people think, the
entrepreneurial sector of the U.S. economy, then we would indeed face
a no-growth period and a period of long-term stagnation in the trough
of a Kondratieff wave.
The Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff was executed on Stalins
orders in the mid-1930s because his econometric model predicted,
accurately as it turned out, that collectivization of Russian agriculture
would lead to a sharp decline in farm production. The fifty-year
Kondratieff cycle was based on the inherent dynamics of technology.
Every fifty years, so Kondratieff asserted, a long technological wave
crests. For the last twenty years of this cycle, the growth industries of the
last technological advance seem to be doing exceptionally well. But what
look like record profits are actually repayments of capital which is no
longer needed in industries that have ceased to grow. This situation
never lasts longer than twenty years, then there is a sudden crisis,
usually signaled by some sort of panic. There follow twenty years of
stagnation, during which the new, emerging technologies cannot
generate enough jobs to make the economy itself grow againand no
one, least of all government, can do much about this.
*
The industries that fueled the long economic expansion after World
War IIautomobiles, steel, rubber, electrical apparatus, consumer
electronics, telephone, but also petroleum
perfectly fit the Kondratieff
cycle. Technologically, all of them go back to the fourth quarter of the
11
nineteenth century or, at the very latest, to before World War I. In none
of them has there been a significant breakthrough since the 1920s,
whether in technology or in business concepts. When the economic
growth began after World War II, they were all thoroughly mature
industries. They could expand and create jobs with relatively little new
capital investment, which explains why they could pay skyrocketing
wages and workers benefits and simultaneously show record profits.
Yet, as Kondratieff had predicted, these signs of robust health were as
deceptive as the flush on a consumptives cheek. The industries were
corroding from within. They did not become stagnant or decline slowly.
Rather, they collapsed as soon as the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979
dealt them the first blows. Within a few years they went from record
profits to near-bankruptcy. As soon became abundantly clear, they will
not be able to return to their earlier employment levels for a long time, if
ever.
The high-tech industries, too, fit Kondratieffs theory. As Kondratieff
had predicted, they have so far not been able to generate more jobs
than the old industries have been losing. All projections indicate that they
will not do much more for long years to come, at least for the rest of the
century. Despite the explosive growth of computers, for instance, data
processing and information handling in all their phases (design and
engineering of both hardware and software, production, sales and
service) are not expected to add as many jobs to the American economy
in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the steel and automotive industries
are almost certain to lose.
But the Kondratieff theory fails totally to account for the 40 million
jobs which the American economy actually did create. Western Europe,
to be sure, has so far been following the Kondratieff script. But not the
United States, and perhaps not Japan either. Something in the United
States offsets the Kondratieff long wave of technology. Something has
already happened that is incompatible with the theory of long-term
stagnation.
Nor does it appear at all likely that we have simply postponed the
Kondratieff cycle. For in the next twenty years the need to create new
jobs in the U.S. economy will be a great deal lower than it has been in
the last twenty years, so that economic growth will depend far less on
job creation. The number of new entrants into the American work force
will be up to one-third smaller for the rest of the centuryand indeed
12
through the year 2010than it was in the years when the children of the
baby boom reached adulthood, that is, 1965 until 1980 or so. Since the
baby bust of 196061, the birth cohorts have been 30 percent lower
than they were during the baby boom years. And with the labor force
participation of women under fifty already equal to that of men, additions
to the number of women available for paid jobs will from now on be
limited to natural growth, which means that they will also be down by
about 30 percent.
For the future of the traditional smokestack industries, the
Kondratieff theory must be accepted as a serious hypothesis, if not
indeed as the most plausible of the available explanations. And as far as
the inability of new high-tech industries to offset the stagnation of
yesterdays growth industries is concerned, Kondratieff again deserves
to be taken seriously. For all their tremendous qualitative importance as
vision makers and pacesetters, quantitatively the high-tech industries
represent tomorrow rather than today, especially as creators of jobs.
They are the makers of the future rather than the makers of the present.
But as a theory of the American economy that can explain its
behavior and predict its direction, Kondratieff can be considered dis-
proven and discredited. The 40 million new jobs created in the U.S.
economy during a Kondratieff long-term stagnation cannot be
explained in Kondratieffs terms.
I do not mean to imply that there are no economic problems or
dangers. Quite the contrary. A major shift in the technological
foundations of the economy such as we are experiencing in the closing
quarter of the twentieth century surely presents tremendous problems,
economic, social, and political. We are also in the throes of a major
political crisis, the crisis of that great twentieth-century success the
Welfare State, with the attendant danger of an uncontrolled and
seemingly uncontrollable but highly inflationary deficit. There is surely
sufficient danger in the international economy, with the worlds rapidly
industrializing nations, such as Brazil or Mexico, suspended between
rapid economic takeoff and disastrous crash, to make possible a
prolonged global depression of 1930 proportions. And then there is the
frightening specter of the runaway armaments race. But at least one of
the fears abroad these days, that of a Kondratieff stagnation, can be
considered more a figment of the imagination than reality for the United
States. There we have a new, an entrepreneurial economy.
13
It is still too early to say whether the entrepreneurial economy will
remain primarily an American phenomenon or whether it will emerge in
other industrially developed countries. In Japan, there is good reason to
believe that it is emerging, albeit in its own, Japanese form. But whether
the same shift to an entrepreneurial economy will occur in western
Europe, no one can yet say. Demographically, western Europe lags
some ten to fifteen years behind America: both the baby boom and the
baby bust came later in Europe than in the United States. Equally, the
shift to much longer years of schooling started in western Europe some
ten years later than in the United States or in Japan; and in Great Britain
it has barely started yet. If, as is quite likely, demographics has been a
factor in the emergence of the entrepreneurial economy in the United
States, we could well see a similar development in Europe by 1990 or
1995. But this is speculation. So far, the entrepreneurial economy is
purely an American phenomenon.
III
Where did all the new jobs come from? The answer is from anywhere
and nowhere; in other words, from no one single source.
The magazine Inc., published in Boston, has printed each year since
1982 a list of the one hundred fastest-growing, publicly owned American
companies more than five years and less than fifteen years old.
Being confined to publicly owned companies, the list is heavily biased
toward high tech, which has easy access to underwriters, to stock
market money, and to being traded on one of the stock exchanges or
over the counter. High tech is fashionable. Other new ventures, as a
rule, can go public only after long years of seasoning, and of showing
profits for a good deal more than five years. Yet only one-quarter of the
Inc. 100 are high-tech; three-quarters remain most decidedly low-
tech, year after year.
In 1982, for instance, there were five restaurant chains, two womens
wear manufacturers, and twenty health-care providers on the list, but
only twenty to thirty high-tech companies. And whilst Americas
newspapers in 1982 ran one article after the other bemoaning the
deindustrialization of America, a full half of the Inc. firms were
14
manufacturing companies; only one-third were in services. Although
word had it in 1982 that the Frost Belt was dying, with the Sun Belt the
only possible growth area, only one-third of the inc. 100 that year were
in the Sun Belt. New York had as many of these fast-growing, young,
publicly owned companies as California or Texas. And Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, and Massachusettswhile supposedly dying, if not already
deadalso had as many as California or Texas, and as many as New
York. Snowy, Minnesota, had seven. The Inc. lists for 1983 and 1984
showed a very similar distribution, in respect both to industry and to
geography.
In 1983, the first and second companies on another Inc. listthe
Inc. 500 list of fast-growing, young, privately held companieswere,
respectively, a building contractor in the Pacific Northwest (in a year in
which construction was supposedly at an all-time low) and a California
manufacturer of physical exercise equipment for the home.
Any inquiry among venture capitalists yields the same pattern.
Indeed, in their portfolios, high tech is usually even less prominent. The
portfolio of one of the most successful venture capital investors does
include several high-tech companies: a new computer software
producer, a new venture in medical technology, and so on. But the most
profitable investment in this portfolio, the new company that has been
growing the fastest in both revenues and profitability during the three
years 198183, is that most mundane and least high-tech of businesses,
a chain of barbershops. And next to it, both in sales growth and
profitability, comes a chain of dentistry offices, followed by a
manufacturer of handtools and by a finance company that leases
machinery to small businesses.
Among the businesses I know personally, the one that has created
the most jobs during the five years 197984, and has also grown the
fastest in revenues and profits, is a financial services firm. Within five
years this firm alone has created two thousand new jobs, most of them
exceedingly well paid. Though a member of the New York Stock
Exchange, only about one-eighth of its business is in stocks. The rest is
in annuities, tax-exempt bonds, money-market funds and mutual funds,
mortgage-trust certificates, tax-shelter partnerships, and a host of similar
investments for what the firm calls the intelligent investor. Such
investors are defined as the well-to-do but not rich professional, small
businessman, or farmer, in small towns or in the suburbs, who makes
15
more money than he spends and thus looks for places to put his
savings, but who is also realistic enough not to expect to become rich
through investment.
The most revealing source of information about the growth sectors of
the U.S. economy I have been able to find is a study of the one hundred
fastest-growing mid-size companies, that is, companies with revenues
of between $25 million and $1 billion. This study was conducted during
198183 for the American Business Conference by two senior partners
of McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm.
*
These mid-sized growth companies grew at three times the rate of
the Fortune 500 in sales and in profits. The Fortune 500 have been
losing jobs steadily since 1970. But these mid-sized growth companies
added jobs between 1970 and 1983 at three times the rate of job growth
in the entire U.S. economy. Even in the depression years 198182 when
jobs in U.S. industry declined by almost 2 percent, the hundred mid-
sized growth companies increased their employment by one full
percentage point. The companies span the economic spectrum. There
are high-tech ones among them, to be sure. But there are also financial
services companiesthe New York investment and brokerage firm of
Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, for instance. One of the best performers in
the group is a company making and selling living-room furniture; another
one is making and marketing doughnuts; a third, high-quality chinaware;
a fourth, writing instruments; a fifth, household paints; a sixth has
expanded from printing and publishing local newspapers into consumer
marketing services; a seventh produces yarns for the textile industry;
and so forth. And where everybody knows that growth in the American
economy is exclusively in services, more than half of these mid-sized
growth companies are in manufacturing.
To make things more confusing still, the growth sector of the U.S.
economy during the last ten to fifteen years, while entirely
nongovernmental, includes a fairly large and growing number of
enterprises that are not normally considered businesses, though quite a
few are now being organized as profit-making companies. The most
visible of these are, of course, in the health-care field. The traditional
American community hospital is in deep trouble these days. But there
are fast-growing and flourishing hospital chains, both profit and
(increasingly) not-for-profit ones. Even faster growing are the
freestanding health facilities, such as hospices for the terminally ill,
16
medical and diagnostic laboratories, freestanding surgery centers,
freestanding maternity homes, psychiatric walk-in clinics, or centers for
geriatric diagnosis and treatment.
The public schools are shrinking in almost every American
community. But despite the decline in the total number of children of
school age as a result of the baby bust of the 1960s, a whole new
species of non-profit but private schools is flourishing. In the small
California city in which I live, a neighborhood babysitting cooperative,
founded around 1980 by a few mothers for their own children, had by
1984 grown into a school with two hundred students going on into the
fourth grade. And a Christian school founded a few years ago by the
local Baptists is taking over from the city of Claremont a junior high
school built fifteen years ago and left standing vacant for lack of pupils
for the last five years. Continuing education of all kinds, whether in the
form of executive management programs for mid-career managers or
refresher courses for doctors, engineers, lawyers, and physical
therapists, is booming; even during the severe 198283 recession, such
programs suffered only a short setback.
One additional area of entrepreneurship, and a very important one, is
the emerging Fourth Sector of public-private partnerships in which
government units, either states or municipalities, determine performance
standards and provide the money. But then they contract out a service
fire protection, garbage collection, or bus transportationto a private
business on the basis of competitive bids, thus ensuring both better
service and substantially lower costs. The city of Lincoln, Nebraska, has
been a pioneer in this area since Helen Boosalis was first elected mayor
in 1975the same Lincoln, Nebraska, where a hundred years ago the
Populists and William Jennings Bryan first started us on the road to
municipal ownership of public services. Pioneering work in this area is
also being done in Texasin San Antonio and in Houston, for instance
and especially in Minneapolis at the Hubert Humphrey Institute of the
University of Minnesota. Control Data Corporation, a leading computer
manufacturer also in Minneapolis, is building public-private partnerships
in education and even in the management and rehabilitation of
prisoners. And if there is one action that can save the postal service in
the long runfor surely there is a limit to the publics willingness to pay
ever larger subsidies and ever higher rates for ever-shrinking serviceit
may be the contracting out of first-class service (or whats still left of it
17
ten years hence) to the Fourth Sector, through competitive bids.
IV
Is there anything at all that these growth enterprises have in common
other than growth and defiance of the Kondratieff stagnation? Actually,
they are all examples of new techn
