Peter Drucker Quotes

Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.

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

You can't manage knowledge.Knowledge is between two ears and only between two ears.

Business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.

Communication always makes demands. It always demands that the recipient become somebody, do something, believe something. It always appeals to motivation.

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

If you're not living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space. The best way to predict the future is to create it.

The computer is a moron.

Important decisions are risky. They should be controversial. Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework.

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

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.

Systematic change requires a willingness to look on change as an opportunity.

What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?

Adversarial power relationships only work if you never have to see or work with the bastards again.

You cannot predict the future, but you can create it.

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

The greatest change in corporate culture - and the way business is being conducted - may be the accelerated growth of relationships based... on partnership.

As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.

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

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

Production is not the application of tools to materials, but logic to work.

The building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are manual labor.

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.

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

Don't solve problems. Pursue opportunities.

You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.

I'm a writer. I could not or would not ever run a business. I don't even have a secretary. And contrary to some of the stereotypes, entrepreneurs are not loners. I am.

The job of a professional manager is not to like people. It is not to change people. It is to put their strengths to work.

Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.

A manager sets objectives - A manager organizes - A manager motivates and communicates - A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures - A manager develops people.

The essence of management is to make knowledge productive.

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

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.

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

There are only two things in a business that make money - innovation and marketing, everything else is cost.

Look upon every obstacle as part payment towards your success.

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.

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

Erroneous assumptions can be disastrous.

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

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?"

What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or a service does for the customer.

In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.

As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it.

If you want to improve how you manage time - stop doing what doesn't need to be done!

The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago.

Thus, for those who are willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovation opportunity.

Knowledge is being applied to knowledge itself. It is now fast becoming the one factor in production, sidelining both capital and labour.

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