Playing the long game

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"Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs."

It’s a famous quotation but I think Peter Drucker misses one important final conceptual leap – when you define them properly, marketing and innovation are the same thing. Or, at the very least, two sides of the same coin.

Two years ago, Stewart Butterfield, a Silicon Valley innovator and co-founder of Flickr and Slack, told colleagues: “The best – maybe the only – real, direct measure of ‘innovation’ is change in human behaviour…Innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so.”

Butterfield is almost certainly right. ...