Top 100 Peter Drucker Quotes
#1. The most effective way to manage change is to create it.
Peter Drucker
#2. Many studies of research scientists have shown that achievement (at least below the genius level of an Einstein, Bohr, or a Planck) depends less on ability in doing research than on the courage to go after opportunity.
Peter Drucker
#3. Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.
Peter Drucker
#4. True marketing starts ... with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?" It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"
Peter Drucker
#5. In the managerial organization, the top people sit in judgment; in the innovative organization it is their job to encourage ideas, no matter how unripe or crude.
Peter Drucker
#6. The final test of greatness in a CEO is how well he chooses a successor and whether he can step aside and let the successor run the company.
Peter Drucker
#7. Business exists to supply goods and services to customers and economic surplus to society, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers or even dividends to shareholders.
Peter Drucker
#8. Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.
Peter Drucker
#9. Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and
tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society.
Peter Drucker
#10. I have been saying for many years that we are using the word 'guru' only because 'charlatan' is too long to fit into a headline.
Peter Drucker
#11. The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.
Peter Drucker
#12. Far too much reorganization goes on all the time. Organizitis is like a spastic colon.
Peter Drucker
#13. The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic.
Peter Drucker
#14. If general perception changes from seeing the glass as 'half-full' to seeing it as 'half empty' there are major innovative opportunities.
Peter Drucker
#16. As a manager you're paid to be uncomfortable. If you're comfortable, it's a sure sign you're doing things wrong.
Peter Drucker
#17. An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.
Peter Drucker
#18. Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.
Peter Drucker
#19. Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong ... And yet, a person can perform only from strength.
Peter Drucker
#20. Innovation opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.
Peter Drucker
#21. Working with people is difficult, but not impossible.
Peter Drucker
#22. Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing.
Peter Drucker
#23. 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.
Peter Drucker
#24. A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant - and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates.
Peter Drucker
#25. Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. SO for more than 60 years I have kept studying one subject at a time.
Peter Drucker
#26. There are only two things in a business that make money - innovation and marketing, everything else is cost.
Peter Drucker
#27. People are effective because they say 'no,' because they say, 'this isn't for me.'
Peter Drucker
#28. The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.
Peter Drucker
#29. Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not bounced.
Peter Drucker
#30. It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.
Peter Drucker
#31. Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.
Peter Drucker
#32. As a rule we perceive what we expect to perceive ... The unexpected is usually not received at all.
Peter Drucker
#33. Production is not the application of tools to materials, but logic to work.
Peter Drucker
#34. 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.
Peter Drucker
#35. Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.
Peter Drucker
#36. If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.
Peter Drucker
#37. As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel.
Peter Drucker
#38. In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise.
Peter Drucker
#39. There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology , society , economy , and institutions .
Peter Drucker
#40. 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.
Peter Drucker
#42. To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.
Peter Drucker
#43. Look upon every obstacle as part payment towards your success.
Peter Drucker
#44. Concentration is the key to economic results. No other principle of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration ... Our motto seems to be, "Let's do a little bit of everything."
Peter Drucker
#45. Knowledge is information that changes something
or somebody - either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an
individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action.
Peter Drucker
#46. In areas where they are simply incompetent, smart executives don't make decisions or take actions. They delegate.
Peter Drucker
#47. The world economy is not yet a community
not even an economic community ... Yet the existence of the "global shopping center" is a fact that cannot be undone. The vision of an economy for all will not be forgotten again.
Peter Drucker
#48. Progress is obtained only by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. When you solve problems, all you do is guarantee a return to normalcy.
Peter Drucker
#49. Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.
Peter Drucker
#50. There are usually half a dozen right answers to what needs to be
done. Yet, unless a person makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing.
Peter Drucker
#51. We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.
Peter Drucker
#52. A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.
Peter Drucker
#53. The 1st question the effective decision-maker asks is: 'Is this a generic situation or an exception?'
Peter Drucker
#54. The fruit of your work grows on other people's trees
Peter Drucker
#55. People who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs.
Peter Drucker
#56. Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past.
Peter Drucker
#58. Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.
Peter Drucker
#59. I have no interest in celebrities. If all the superrich disappeared, the world economy would not even notice. The superrich are irrelevant to the economy.
Peter Drucker
#60. The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.
Peter Drucker
#61. Successful people know they need to get many things done-and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate their time and energy on doing one thing at a time-and on doing first things firs.
Peter Drucker
#62. The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle age, soured, cynical, unproductive.
Peter Drucker
#63. The computer, being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data.
Peter Drucker
#64. If something fails despite being carefully planned, carefully designed, and conscientiously executed, that failure often bespeaks underlying change and, with it, opportunity.
Peter Drucker
#65. As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it.
Peter Drucker
#66. The only real difference between one organization and another is the performance of its people.
Peter Drucker
#67. A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.
Peter Drucker
#68. You can't manage knowledge.Knowledge is between two ears and only between two ears.
Peter Drucker
#69. The leader sees leadership as responsibility rather than as rank and privilege.
Peter Drucker
#70. Management is not being brilliant. Management is being conscientious.
Peter Drucker
#72. Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.
Peter Drucker
#73. Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.
Peter Drucker
#74. No business can do everything. Even if it has the money, it will never have enough good people. It has to set priorities. The worst thing to do is a little bit of everything. This makes sure that nothing is being accomplished. It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.
Peter Drucker
#75. All great change in business has come from outside the firm, not from inside.
Peter Drucker
#76. I'm better about things than about people. I'm more interested in people, but I'm better at ideas.
Peter Drucker
#77. Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
Peter Drucker
#78. Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual. They fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.
Peter Drucker
#79. When a resource is scarce, you increase its yield.
Peter Drucker
#80. To improve communications, work not on the utter, but the recipient.
Peter Drucker
#81. You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths.
Peter Drucker
#82. The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
Peter Drucker
#83. Marketing is not a function, it is the whole business seen from the customer's point of view.
Peter Drucker
#84. "The area in which the executive first encounters the challenge of strength is in staffing. The effective executive fills positions and promotes on the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to minimize weaknesses but to maximize strength."
Peter Drucker
#85. What managers decide to stop doing is often more important than what they decide to do.
Peter Drucker
#86. Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will be taken over by a Central government
Peter Drucker
#87. The greatest change in corporate culture - and the way business is being conducted - may be the accelerated growth of relationships based ... on partnership.
Peter Drucker
#88. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.
Peter Drucker
#89. Businesses once grew by one of two ways; grass roots up, or by acquisition ... Today businesses grow through alliances - all kinds of dangerous alliances. Joint ventures and customer partnerings which, by the way, very few people understand.
Peter Drucker
#90. Our most important education system is in the employees' own organization.
Peter Drucker
#91. The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.
Peter Drucker
#92. In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.
Peter Drucker
#93. The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.
Peter Drucker
#94. The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago.
Peter Drucker
#95. Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity
Peter Drucker
#96. The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Peter Drucker
#97. Education gives you neither experience nor wisdom.
Peter Drucker
#98. Communication is always " propaganda ." The emitter always wants "to get something across.
Peter Drucker
#99. 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.
Peter Drucker
#100. All good strategy eventually degenerates into work.
Peter Drucker
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