Peter Drucker Quotes

Mother Teresa's numerical results were not her greatest contribution. Instead, she made the world-and especially India-conscious of compassion.

We have tried to substitute mass for purpose. We have tried to regain military potency of defense by making it gigantic, unwieldy, complex. It never works.

Once a year ask the boss, "What do I or my people do that helps you to do your job?" and "What do I or my people do that hampers you?

More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.

Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.

The essence of management is to make knowledge productive.

The subordinate's job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual.

No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.

Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change

The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it.

Long range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.

In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a non- world.

Ideas are cheap and abundant; what is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.

If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total
depression.

Do what you do best, and outsource the rest.

The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.

Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution.

Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity

Leadership is not rank, privileges, title or money. It is responsibility.

Results is all that separates one company from another.

Progress is obtained only by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. When you solve problems, all you do is guarantee a return to normalcy.

No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.

The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.

Knowledge is the source of Wealth. Applied to tasks we already know, it becomes Productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes Innovation ...

Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will be taken over by a Central government

If you want to know what the future is, be part of its development.

Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.

Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.

Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management.

Education gives you neither experience nor wisdom.

Knowledge applied is productivity.

The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. She therefore makes sure she puts into the leadership position, into the standard-setting, the performance-making position the person who has the strength to do the outstanding pacesetting job. This always requires focus on the one strength of a person and dismissal of weaknesses as irrelevant unless they hamper the full deployment of the available strength.

If something fails despite being carefully planned, carefully designed, and conscientiously executed, that failure often bespeaks underlying change and, with it, opportunity.

Ideas are like frog eggs: you've got to lay a thousand to hatch one.

If a business is to be considered a continuous process, instead of a series of disjointed stop-and-go events, then the economic universe in which a business operates-and all the major events within it-must have rhyme, rhythm, or reason.

Most of what you hear about entrepreneurshi p is all wrong. It's not magic; it's not mysterious; and it has nothing to do with genes. It's a discipline and, like any discipline, it can be learned.

Innovation opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

Here is need for a person to be generally educated. Otherwise you shrivel up much too soon. Whether this means reading the bible (I read the New Testament every few years) or reading the great 19th century novelists (the greatest and shrewdest judge of people and of society who ever lived), or classical philosophy (which I cannot read-it puts me to sleep immediately), or history (which is secondary). What matters is that the knowledge worker, by the time he or she reaches middle age, has developed and nourished a human being rather than a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer.

When a resource is scarce, you increase its yield.

Management has authority only as long as it performs.

If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.

The correct assumption is that what individuals have learned by age twenty-one will begin to become obsolete five to ten years later and will have to be replaced-or at least refurbished-by new learning, new skills, new knowledge.

The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.

Leadership is more doing than dash.

We've spent the last 30 years focusing on the T in IT, and we'll spend the next 30 years focusing on the I.

The 1st question the effective decision-maker asks is: 'Is this a generic situation or an exception?'

What is the manager's job? It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite - and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to problems rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results.

Increasingly, politics is not about "who gets what, when, how" but about values, each of them considered to be absolute. Politics is about "the right to life." It is about the environment. It is about gaining equality for groups alleged to be oppressed. None of these issues is economic. All are fundamentally moral.

Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.

To make a living is no longer enough. Work also has to make a life.

The Pertinent Question is NOT how to do things right - but how to find the right things to do, and to concentrate resources and efforts on them.

Every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.

Salvation by society failed the most where it promised the most, in the communist countries. But it also failed in the West. Practically no government program enacted since the 1950s in the Western world - or in the communist countries - has been successful.

To improve communications, work not on the utter, but the recipient.

The relevant question is not simply what shall we do tomorrow, but rather what shall we do today in order to get ready for tomorrow.

Institutions mistake good intentions for objectives. They say "health care"; that's an intention, not an objective.

In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers , is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power.

Mission defines strategy, and strategy defines structure.

Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese.

The most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question.

If you have more than five goals, you have none.

There is no perfect strategic decision. One always has to pay a price. One always has to balance conflicting objectives, conflicting opinions, and conflicting priorities. The best strategic decision is only an approximation - and a risk.

No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.

Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.

Successful innovators are..not risk-focused; they are opportunity focused.

Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.

Do not measure your life by your goals but what you are doing to achieve them.

There's no such thing as knowledge management;
there are only knowledgeable people.
Information only becomes knowledge
in the hands of someone
who knows what to do with it.

It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people: a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are told.

An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.

When the business grows, the person who founded it is incredibly busy. Rapid growth puts an enormous strain on a business. You outgrow your production facilities. You outgrow your management capabilities.

And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.

Listening (the first competence of leadership) is not a skill, it is a discipline. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.

It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.

It is commonly believed that innovations create changes - but few ever do. Successful innovations exploit changes that have already happened.

Shoes are real. Money is an end result.

A business exists because the consumer is willing to pay you his money. You run a business to satisfy the consumer. That isn't marketing. That goes way beyond marketing.

Most executives have learned that what one postpones, one actually abandons ... timing is a most important element in the success of any effort. To do five years later what would have been smart to do five years earlier, is almost a sure recipe for frustration and failure.

There are no creeds in mathematics.

Our job in life is to make a positive difference, not prove we're right.

The only real difference between one organization and another is the performance of its people.

"Plastic moments" are those periods that overlap when the old has gone but the new has not yet arrived and when the course of history is more open to being shaped and steered than any other time.

The need to manage oneself is creating a revolution in human affairs.

We can ill afford to have activities conducted as "non-profit," that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.

The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today's society.

Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.

If general perception changes from seeing the glass as 'half-full' to seeing it as 'half empty' there are major innovative opportunities.

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic.

The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.

The new always looks so puny-so unpromising-next to the reality of the massive, ongoing business.

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside.The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a satisfied patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise there are only costs.

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you've got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out.

The healthier a new venture and the faster it grows, the more financial feeding it requires.

Tomorrow always arrives. It is always different. And even the mightiest company is in trouble if it has not worked on the future. Being surprised by what happens is a risk that even the largest and richest company cannot afford, and even the smallest business need not run.

Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined.