Peter Drucker Quotes

What people in business think they know about the customer and market is likely to be more wrong than right...the customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him.

The essence of management is to make knowledge productive.

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

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.

The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, "If we assign this general to lead this base, what do we expect him to accomplish?"

One either meets or one works.

By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.

Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.

When a resource is scarce, you increase its yield.

Business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

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

Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. SO for more than 60 years I have kept studying one subject at a time.

Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.

The final test of greatness in a CEO is how well he chooses a successor and whether he can step aside and let the successor run the company.

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation.

What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter.

Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people -- and allow people to place themselves -- according to their strengths.

Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order... catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society.

Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.

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

An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.

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

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!

For the social ecologist language is not "communication." It is not just "message." It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communication. ...Social ecologists need not be "great" writers; but they have to be respectful writers, caring writers.

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

Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time.

Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will be taken over by a Central government

The critical question is not "How can I achieve?" but "What can I contribute?"

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.

Schools will change more in the next 30 years than they have since the invention of the printed book.

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

Every enterprise is learning and teaching institution. Training and development must be built into it on all levels, training and development that never stop.

Our society has become an employee society.

The postwar [WWII] GI Bill of Rights - and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans - signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century. We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world.

The relevant question is not simply what shall we do tomorrow, but rather what shall we do today in order to get ready for tomorrow.

One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.

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.

A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.

The great mystery isn't that people do things badly but that they occasionally do a few things well. The only thing that is universal is incompetence. Strength is always specific! Nobody ever commented, for example, that the great violinist Jascha Heifetz probably couldn't play the trumpet very well.

Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.

Marketing and innovation make money. Everything else is a cost.

Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.

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

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

Erroneous assumptions can be disastrous.

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got.