Wealth & Money Quote by Peter Drucker

Drucker’s genius here is that he strips innovation of its TED-talk sparkle and frames it as a tool, not a personality trait. Calling it “the specific instrument” is managerial sleight of hand: it drags innovation out of the realm of inspiration and into the realm of method. Entrepreneurs, in this view, aren’t romantics chasing flashes of brilliance; they’re technicians of change, turning novelty into throughput.

The phrase “endows resources” carries the subtext that resources don’t naturally produce wealth. Labor, capital, information, even time are inert until someone reconfigures how they’re used. Innovation isn’t just invention; it’s a reassignment of purpose. A technology that sits on a shelf isn’t innovative. A business model that makes that technology legible, scalable, and profitable is. Drucker is quietly rebuking the cult of the lone genius by emphasizing capacity: what matters is not the new thing, but the new ability it creates in the system.

Context matters: Drucker wrote in an era when large organizations were learning to metabolize rapid postwar technological change, and when “entrepreneurship” was being professionalized into a discipline rather than a gamble. The line also smuggles in an ethical neutrality that’s very Drucker: wealth creation is the output, not necessarily the justification. Innovation becomes the lever that converts constraints into advantage, but it leaves open the harder question modern readers can’t ignore: wealth for whom, and at what cost.