Peter Drucker Quotes

I have no interest in celebrities. If all the superrich disappeared, the world economy would not even notice. The superrich are irrelevant to the economy.

The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system's weaknesses irrelevant.

You must accept that if the computer is a tool, it is the job of tool user to know what to use it for.

The knowledge we now consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information effective in action, information focused on results. Results are outside the person, in society and economy, or in the advancement of knowledge itself. To accomplish anything this knowledge has to be highly specialized.

The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.

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

Few relationships are as critical to the business enterprise as the relationship to the government. Managers have responsibility for this relationship as part of their responsibility to the enterprise itself. It is an area of social impact of the business. To a large extent the relationship to government results from what businesses do or fail to do.

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

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

There's nothing so useless than executing a task efficiently when it actually never should have been executed at all.

Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.

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

The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.

Many studies of research scientists have shown that achievement (at least below the genius level of an Einstein, Bohr, or a Planck) depends less on ability in doing research than on the courage to go after opportunity.

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.

Management and entrepreneurship are only two different dimensions of the same task. An entrepreneur who does not learn how to manage will not last long. A management that does not learn to innovate will not last long.

An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.

Morale in an organization does not mean that "people get along together"; the test is performance not conformance.

There is one qualification the manager cannot acquire but must bring to the task. It is not genius; it is character.

Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes - it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.

There are two types of people in the business community: those who produce results and those who give you reasons why they didn't.

Shoes are real. Money is an end result.

Knowledge has become the key resource of the world economy.

The building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

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

The correct assumption is that what individuals have learned by age twenty-one will begin to become obsolete five to ten years later and will have to be replaced-or at least refurbished-by new learning, new skills, new knowledge.

The corporation is the "master", the employee is the "servant". Because the corporation owns the means of production without which the employee could not make a living, the employee needs the corporation more than vice versa.

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

If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the "bourgeois" under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource.

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

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

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

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