Peter Drucker Quotes

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out.

The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society.

The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.

A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

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

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

Replace your pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution.

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

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

You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths.

No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.

Education gives you neither experience nor wisdom.

If something fails despite being carefully planned, carefully designed, and conscientiously executed, that failure often bespeaks underlying change and, with it, opportunity.

Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.

The strength of the computer lies in its being a logic machine. It does precisely what it is programed to do. This makes it fast and precise. It also makes it a total moron; for logic is essentially stupid.

There is no perfect strategic decision. One always has to pay a price. One always has to balance conflicting objectives, conflicting opinions, and conflicting priorities. The best strategic decision is only an approximation - and a risk.

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

Most leaders don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.

Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.

The race for Quality has no finish line - so technically, it's more like a death march. Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

The computer actually may have aggravated management's degenerative tendency to focus inward on costs.

Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past.

The real development I've seen of people in organizations, especially in big ones, comes from their being volunteers in a nonprofit organization - where you have responsibility, you see results, and you quickly learn what your values are. There is no better way to understand your strengths and discover where you belong than to volunteer in a nonprofit. That is probably the great opportunity for the social sector - and especially in its relationship to business.

Education can no longer be the sole property of the state.

We can't make people better by trying to eliminate their weaknesses, but we can help then perform better by building on their strengths.

Trees die from the top”. No one should ever become a strategist unless he or she is willing to have his or her character serve as a model for subordinates

More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.

Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.

Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.

Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.

Business is society's change agent.

Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills - accounting and what have you - but you can't teach them management.

You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers - because without trust, they won't fight.

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

The most critical case in a corporation, especially a big one, is when everything goes well, when you have accomplished your objectives. When the temptation is to work twice as hard instead of saying, "We have accomplished our objectives, we have to think again."

The computer is a moron.

The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

It's amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed.

The 1st question the effective decision-maker asks is: 'Is this a generic situation or an exception?'

Don't try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present!

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Use feedback analysis to identify your strengths. Then go to work on improving your strengths. Identify and eliminate bad habits that hinder the full development of your strengths. Figure out what you should do and do it. Finally, decide what you should not do.

The productivity of people requires continuous learning, as the Japanese have taught us. It requires adoption in the West of the specific Japanese Zen concept where one learns to do better what one already does well.

Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not bounced.