Peter Drucker Quotes

If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.

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.

Management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.

Leadership is not rank, privileges, title or money. It is responsibility.

Work is an extension of personality. It is achievement. It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself, measures his worth, and his humanity.

The manager who comes up with the right solution to the wrong problem is more dangerous than the manager who comes up with the wrong solution to the right problem.

Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody - either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action.

Every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.

The person who will make the greatest contribution to a company is the mature person-and you cannot have maturity if you have no life or interest outside the job.

Working with people is difficult, but not impossible.

To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.

Successful leaders don't start out asking, 'What do I want to do?' They ask, 'What needs to be done?' Then they ask, 'Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?'

People alone of all the resources can grow and develop.

Making changes to better appeal to customer is INNOVATION.

Knowledge has become the key resource of the world economy.

One can either work or meet. One cannot do both at the same time.

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

Institutions mistake good intentions for objectives. They say "health care"; that's an intention, not an objective.

For the first four years, no new enterprise produces profits. Even Mozart didn't start writing music until he was four.

A business exists because the consumer is willing to pay you his money. You run a business to satisfy the consumer. That isn't marketing. That goes way beyond marketing.

Providing more desirable products, services, and customer experiences is vital to the continued existence of any business. And that is INNOVATION.

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

There are usually half a dozen right answers to what needs to be done. Yet, unless a person makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing.

What managers decide to stop doing is often more important than what they decide to do.

No other area offers richer opportunities for successful innovation than the unexpected success.

An employer has no business with a man's personality... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.

A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.

Shoes are real. Money is an end result.

Nobody can predict the future; the idea is to have a firm grasp of the present.

Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.

Management and union may be likened to that serpent of the fables who on one body had two heads that fighting each other with poisoned fangs, killed themselves.

"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.

The new always looks so puny-so unpromising-next to the reality of the massive, ongoing business.

Information is the manager's main tool, indeed the manager's capital, and it is he who must decide what information he needs and how to use it.

The real achiever do one thing at a time.

Technology is not about tools, it deals with how Man works.

The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle age, soured, cynical, unproductive.

To improve communications, work not on the utter, but the recipient.

Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing.

As a rule we perceive what we expect to perceive... The unexpected is usually not received at all.

Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant

Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions.

Results is all that separates one company from another.

Decisions exist only in the present.

Knowledge applied is productivity.

We will have to learn to lead people rather then to contain them.

Knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant-and perhaps even the only-source of competitive advantage.

We always remember best the irrelevant.

Most innovators are successful to the extent to which they define risks and confine them.

When Henry Ford said, "The customer can have a car in any color as long as it's black," he was not joking.