Maybe it would expose you to information that's outside your own personal experience?
AT&T was quite a big company in its prime, a monopoly in fact, but extremely innovative. Same goes for Xerox. I suspect Google's longer-reaching research efforts (quantum computing, machine learning) could pay off similar dividends eventually, if they aren't regulated out of existence.
Yes, big companies are often hampered by bureaucracy. Many are not innovative. And in all cases, the majority of employees need to focus on the bread-and-butter work that keeps the lights on. But big companies also have the resources needed to invest in long-term R&D with potentially big payoff down the road.
Conversely, you could make the case that most SV start-ups are actually not that innovative, and that SV as a whole gets perversely fixated on the past: every occasional success, whether it's social media or mobile apps or the gig economy, spawns a thousand imitators hoping to cash in on past success. Do we really need to be funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to create more "Like X but for Y" smartphone apps?
I've seen this stuff for DECADES. Another book is not on the menu. NOTHING has changed and pretending there's new insight is pointless.
> big companies also have the resources needed to invest in long-term R&D with potentially big payoff down the road.
Very few do this (AMZ is one, MSFT another). The exceptions do not make a rule, nor do they "innovate" (iterative improvement) as much as "experiment" to break into new markets. This is an important observation, which is a good indicator of the level of analysis performed.
It's important to note, innovation itself rarely lends to a successful company, which is a different discussion and necessarily colors the state of things.
The book is 35 years old, and Drucker himself was 76 years old when it was published. He was considered a well-respected guy in the field, to understate it somewhat, and he had also seen this stuff for decades.
Many management books are not worth the time it takes to read them. But in my opinion, Drucker is always worth the investment even if he turns out to be wrong about a particular topic.
That's nice to sell a book, but I see no need to read that pablum. A large established company vs a startup (<50 employees) is night and day.
Having worked for decades in the "industry", which is a conglomeration of all industry, an Amazon team pushes a production button style change and it goes on the quarterly release notes with fanfare, while small companies are iterating daily. JPMorgan, Experian, Cambia...you hear VPs talking about meetings with congress critters, but it's largely to pull blood from stone, not to make a better product. That would be incidental, if ever, as long as the metrics they are fed show an incline.