Peter Drucker Quotes

No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.

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

One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work.

Decision making is the specific executive task.

Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change

Do what you do best, and outsource the rest.

You can't manage what you don't measure.

Do the right things instead of trying to do everything right.

A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.

Business is society's change agent.

Every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise.

Do not measure your life by your goals but what you are doing to achieve them.

All great change in business has come from outside the firm, not from inside.

Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

One does not start with facts. One starts with opinions.

Above all, innovation is not invention. It is a term of economics rather than of technology.

Great wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.

Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.

Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable.

[T]hroughout the ages to be educated meant to be unproductive.... our word "school" - and its equivalent in all European languages - derives from a Greek word meaning "leisure.

Unless strategy evaluation is performed seriously and systematically, and unless strategists are willing to act on the results, energy will be used up defending yesterday.

Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.

Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise.

I'm better about things than about people. I'm more interested in people, but I'm better at ideas.

A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.

The need to manage oneself is creating a revolution in human affairs.

Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.

When it rains manna from heaven, some people put up an umbrella. Others reach for a big spoon.

They wrongly believe that good intentions move mountains. Bulldozers move mountains. But there are exceptions.

Leadership is an achievement of trust.

The true business of every company is to make and keep customers.

One does not "manage" people. The task is to lead people.

Vision without execution is delusion. The joy is in the results

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

People who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs.

Unless a decision has degenerated into work, it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.

All good strategy eventually degenerates into work.

If "socialism" is defined as "ownership of the means of production"--and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition--then the United States is the first truly Socialist country.

Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.

People are effective because they say 'no,' because they say, 'this isn't for me.'

Managers are agents of transformation, converting the workforce in developed countries from one of manual workers to one of highly educated knowledge workers.

Our society has become an employee society.

It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, ...The enterprise must demand it of him.

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?"

Defending yesterday is far more risky than making tomorrow.

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.

Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.

For new technology to replace old, it has to have at least ten times the benefit.

Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong... And yet, a person can perform only from strength.

The worker's effectiveness is determined largely by the way he is being managed.