Peter Drucker Organization Quotations

Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.

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

Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.

Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not bounced.

People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.

Morale in an organization does not mean that “people get along together”; the test is performance not conformance.

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

Organizations are no longer built on force, but on trust.

Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.

The organization is, above all, social. It is people.

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.

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

Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.

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.

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.

Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people -- and allow people to place themselves -- according to their strengths.

In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the one predictable thing in any organization is the crisis. That always comes. That's when you do depend on the leader: The job of the leader is to build an organization that is battle-ready, that has high morale, that knows how to behave, that trusts itself, and where people trust one another.

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?"

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

...because knowledge rapidly deteriorates unless it is used constantly, maintaining within an organization an activity that is used only intermittently guarantees incompetence.

Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive.

An organization which just perpetuates today's level of vision, excellence, and accomplishment has lost the capacity to adapt.

Our most important education system is in the employees' own organization.

Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work - on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself - it must be organized for constant change.

No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary human beings perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each man's strength to help all the others perform. The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.

Most organizations staff their problems & starve their opportunities.

Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.

A business is not defined by its name, statutes, or articles of incorporation. It is defined by the business mission. Only a clear definition of the mission and purpose of the organization makes possible clear and realistic business objectives.

To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent

Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.

An organization belongs on a sick list when promotion becomes more important to its people than accomplishment of their job they are in. It is sick when it is more concerned with avoiding mistakes than with taking risks, with counteracting the weaknesses of its members than with building on their strength. But it is sick also when "good human relations" become more important than performance and achievement.

human beings need community. If there are no communities available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities... Only the social sector, that is, the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, can create what we now need, communities for citizens... What the dawning 21st century needs above all is equally explosive growth of the nonprofit social sector in building communities in the newly dominant social environment, the city.

Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.

The moment people talk of "implementing" instead of "doing," and of "finalizing" instead of "finishing," the organization is already running a fever.

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.

The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things.

The greatest challenge to organizations is the balance between continuity and change. You need both. At different times, the balance is slightly more over here, or slightly more over there, but you need both. And balance is basically the greatest task in leadership. Organizations have to have continuity, and yet if there is not enough new challenge, not enough change, they become empty bureaucracies, awfully fast.

The large organization has to learn to innovate, or it won't survive.