Peter Drucker Quotes

Business has only two basic functions - marketing and innovation.

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.

The question that faces the strategic decision maker is not what his organisation should do tomorrow. It is, what do we have to do today to be ready for an uncertain tomorrow?

If you have more than five goals, you have none.

Results is all that separates one company from another.

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

The real achiever do one thing at a time.

The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.

Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.

People in any organization, including bureaucrats and politicians, are always attached to the obsolete; the obsolescent; the things that should have worked but didn't; the things that once were productive and no longer are.

Focus on opportunities, not problems.

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.

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

Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.

We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad, ...We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order... We see change as being order itself - indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one.

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

It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.

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

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.

The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. She therefore makes sure she puts into the leadership position, into the standard-setting, the performance-making position the person who has the strength to do the outstanding pacesetting job. This always requires focus on the one strength of a person and dismissal of weaknesses as irrelevant unless they hamper the full deployment of the available strength.

The dilemma of modern society: the conflict between the need for capital formation at a high rate and the popular condemnation of interest and dividends as "unearned income" and "capitalist," if not as sinful and wicked.

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

Decision making is the specific executive task.

It is commonly believed that innovations create changes - but few ever do. Successful innovations exploit changes that have already happened.

The most probable assumption is that no currently working 'business theory' will be valid 10 years hence.

Effective people are not problem minded; they're opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively.

Businesses once grew by one of two ways; grass roots up, or by acquisition... Today businesses grow through alliances - all kinds of dangerous alliances. Joint ventures and customer partnerings which, by the way, very few people understand.

People who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs.

Do first things first, and second things not at all.

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

There is nothing worse than doing the wrong thing well.

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

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

Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society – and especially in the economy – as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. This is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur.

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

Any organisation develops people; it either forms them or deforms them.

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

Progress is obtained only by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. When you solve problems, all you do is guarantee a return to normalcy.

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

No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real.

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

Every first-rate editor I have ever heard of reads, edits and rewrites every word that goes into his publication.... Good editors are not 'permissive'; they do not let their colleagues do 'their thing'; they make sure that everybody does the 'paper's thing.' A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done.

Quality of character doesn't make a leader, but the lack of it flaws the entire process.

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

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.

Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen.

The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today's society.

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