Peter Drucker Quotations

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

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

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

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

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.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations... They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.'

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

Business, that's easily defined - it's other people's money.

Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

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.

Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

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.

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the 'naturals,' the ones who somehow know how to teach.

The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.

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.

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got.

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work

People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.

Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.

Leadership is not magnetic personality/that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not making friends and influencing people /that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

Knowledge workers are neither farmers nor labor nor business; they are employees of organizations.

There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.

The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

Management is doing a thing right; leadership is doing the right things.

Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven't.

Management by objectives works if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.

Time is the scarcest resource of the manager; If it is not managed, nothing else can be managed.

The overseer of the unskilled peasants who dragged stone for the pyramids did not concern himself with morale or motivation,

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

Concentration is the key to economic results. No other principles of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration.

First and last, Drucker is a moralist of our business civilization.

People who don't take risks generally make about 2 big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about 2 big mistakes a year.

The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.

There is only one ethics, one set of rules of morality, one code: That of individual behavior in which the same rules apply to everyone alike.

The better a man is the more mistakes he will make for the more things he will try.

His great strength was not his charisma, as many commonly thought, but that he knew exactly what he could do and what he could not do.

How can we overcome the resistance to innovation that plagues most organizations?

A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.

The growth for education and training will be in continuing adult education. Online delivery is the trigger for this growth, but the demand for lifetime education stems from profound changes in society. We live in an economy where knowledge, not buildings and machinery, is the chief resource and where knowledge-workers make up the biggest part of the work force.

The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done.

Because its purpose is to create a customer, your business has two purposes and two purposes only: Marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation make you money, generate sales, produce profit. Everything else is an expense...

Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself - not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.

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 critical question is not "How can I achieve?" but "What can I contribute?"

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

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.

Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.

An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance. Any attempt to go beyond that is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no "loyalty," he owes no "love" and no "attitudes"-he owes performance and nothing else. The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.

What gets measured gets managed.

The key to greatness is to look for people's potential and spend time developing it.

Knowledge is power. In post-capitalism, power comes from transmitting information to make it productive, not hiding it.

The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.

One cannot buy, rent or hire more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it. Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time. All work takes place in, and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource.

The bеѕt wау tо predict уоur future іѕ tо create it.

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.

Mission defines strategy, and strategy defines structure.

The enterprise can fulfill its human and social functions only if it prospers as a business.

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old

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

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.

What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

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

Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person - hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre - into an outstanding performer.

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.

A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.

If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

Strategic management is not a box of tricks or a bundle of techniques. It is analytical thinking and commitment of resources to action. But quantification alone is not planning. Some of the most important issues in strategic management cannot be quantified at all.

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...

Loafing" is easy, but "leisure" is difficult.

In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time - literally - substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.

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.

Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don't have enough of it, you're out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you're really missing something.