Top 100 Drucker's Quotes
#1. Few people on earth know Peter Drucker and his work better than Bruce Rosenstein. This is a welcome, unique and very personal addition to Drucker's incomparable legacy.
Bob Buford
#2. An organization which just perpetuates today's level of vision, excellence, and accomplishment has lost the capacity to adapt.
Peter Drucker
#3. We can't make people better by trying to eliminate their weaknesses, but we can help then perform better by building on their strengths.
Peter Drucker
#4. Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.
Peter Drucker
#5. Knowledge is the source of Wealth. Applied to tasks we already know, it becomes Productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes Innovation ...
Peter Drucker
#6. But there seems to be little correlation between a man's effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination or his knowledge.
Peter F. Drucker
#7. Understanding our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong
these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of knowledge workers.
Peter Drucker
#8. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is ... to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker
Peter Drucker
#9. The most probable assumption is that no currently working 'business theory' will be valid 10 years hence.
Peter Drucker
#10. 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
#11. One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.
Peter Drucker
#12. Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!
Peter Drucker
#13. Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive.
Peter Drucker
#14. The productivity of people requires continuous learning, as the Japanese have taught us. It requires adoption in the West of the specific Japanese Zen concept where one learns to do better what one already does well.
Peter Drucker
#15. Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.
Peter Drucker
#16. Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.
Peter Drucker
#17. 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
#18. No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.
Peter Drucker
#19. In the Next Society's corporation, top management will be the company. Everything else can be outsourced.
Peter F. Drucker
#20. The critical question is not "How can I achieve?" but "What can I contribute?"
Peter Drucker
#21. 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
#22. A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.
Peter Drucker
#23. 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
#24. In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a non- world.
Peter Drucker
#25. 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.
Peter Drucker
#26. Top management as a function and as a structure was first developed by Georg Siemens (1839-1901) in Germany between 1870 and 1880, when he designed and built the Deutsche Bank and made it, within a very few years, into continental Europe's leading and most dynamic financial institution.
Peter Drucker
#27. To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent
Peter Drucker
#28. The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society.
Peter Drucker
#29. The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system's weaknesses irrelevant.
Peter Drucker
#30. "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.
Peter Drucker
#31. If general perception changes from seeing the glass as 'half-full' to seeing it as 'half empty' there are major innovative opportunities.
Peter Drucker
#32. The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic.
Peter Drucker
#33. Far too much reorganization goes on all the time. Organizitis is like a spastic colon.
Peter Drucker
#34. Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.
Peter F. Drucker
#35. A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.
Peter F. Drucker
#36. Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.
Peter Drucker
#37. For every organization needs performance in three major areas: It needs direct results; building of values and their reaffirmation; and building and developing people for tomorrow.
Peter F. Drucker
#38. That people even in well paid jobs choose ever earlier retirement is a severe indictment of our organizations
not just business , but government service, the universities. These people don't find their jobs interesting.
Peter Drucker
#39. Staffing the opportunities instead of the problems not only creates the most effective organization, it also creates enthusiasm and dedication.
Peter F. Drucker
#40. I don't think that design needs theory, but I think designers need theory.
Johanna Drucker
#41. The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.
Peter Drucker
#42. We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.
Peter F. Drucker
#43. Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise.
Peter Drucker
#44. 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
#45. Most organizations staff their problems & starve their opportunities.
Peter Drucker
#46. Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are manual labor.
Peter Drucker
#47. I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information.
Peter Drucker
#48. I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels,' he says, ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. 'I do not read management or economics.'
(from an interview in the Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 1993)
Peter F. Drucker
#49. The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try.
Peter Drucker
#50. Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.
Peter Drucker
#51. A business enterprise must continue beyond the lifetime of the individual or of the generation to be capable of producing its contributions to economy and to society.
Peter Drucker
#52. Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.
Peter F. Drucker
#53. We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.
Peter Drucker
#54. A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.
Peter Drucker
#55. There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.
Peter Drucker
#56. The fault is in the system and not in the men.
Peter Drucker
#57. The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things.
Peter Drucker
#58. The essence of management is to make knowledge productive.
Peter Drucker
#59. Organizations are no longer built on force, but on trust.
Peter Drucker
#61. 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.
Peter Drucker
#62. Any organisation develops people; it either forms them or deforms them.
Peter Drucker
#63. Decision making is the specific executive task.
Peter Drucker
#64. There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.
Peter F. Drucker
#65. Too many leaders try to do a little bit of 25 things and get nothing done. They are very popular because they always say yes. But they get nothing done.
Peter Drucker
#66. In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.
Peter Drucker
#67. 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.
Peter Drucker
#69. What people in business think they know about the customer and market is likely to be more wrong than right ... the customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him.
Peter Drucker
#70. The most important thing about priorities and posteriorities is not intelligent analysis but courage.
Peter F. Drucker
#71. Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two and only two functions: Marketing and Innovation. Marketing and Innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.
Peter Drucker
#72. Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen.
Peter Drucker
#73. You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers - because without trust, they won't fight.
Peter Drucker
#74. this book itself is not a book on what people at the top do or should do. It is addressed to everyone who, as a knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization.
Peter F. Drucker
#75. We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don't spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop
Peter Drucker
#76. The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, "If we assign this general to lead this base, what do we expect him to accomplish?"
Peter Drucker
#77. What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter.
Peter Drucker
#78. Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures.
Peter F. Drucker
#79. What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can't be very good.
Peter Drucker
#80. 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
#82. The individual needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of his Creator and subject to Him.
Peter Drucker
#83. Any time I have seen someone accomplishing something magnificent, they have been a monomaniac with a mission. A single-minded individual with a passion.
Peter Drucker
#84. Spontaneity is an infinite number of rehearsed possibilities.
Peter Drucker
#85. It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.
Peter Drucker
#86. We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad. We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order. We see change as being order itself-indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one.
Peter Drucker
#87. Communication always makes demands. It always demands that the recipient become somebody, do something, believe something. It always appeals to motivation.
Peter Drucker
#88. 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.
Peter Drucker
#89. Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.
Peter Drucker
#90. Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are a means to mobilize resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.
Peter Drucker
#91. Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.
Peter Drucker
#92. People alone of all the resources can grow and develop.
Peter Drucker
#93. No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility.
Peter Drucker
#94. The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.
Peter Drucker
#95. In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.
Peter Drucker
#96. Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.
Peter Drucker
#97. Ideas are cheap and abundant; what is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.
Peter Drucker
#98. 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
#99. The most effective way to manage change is to create it.
Peter Drucker
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