Peter Drucker Quotes

If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

The key to greatness is to look for people's potential and spend time developing it.

Knowledge people and service people learn the most when they teach .

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.

The "non-profit" institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its "product" is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their "product" is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.

..there is need for a person to be generally educated. Otherwise you shrivel up much too soon. Whether this means reading the bible (I read the New Testament every few years) or reading the great 19th century novelists (the greatest and shrewdest judge of people and of society who ever lived), or classical philosophy (which I cannot read-it puts me to sleep immediately), or history (which is secondary). What matters is that the knowledge worker, by the time he or she reaches middle age, has developed and nourished a human being rather than a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer.

Do what you do best, and outsource the rest.

The more successful the unit, the more difficult it is to make sure that the large company doesn't put the same expectations on it as it does for the rest of the company. When it's a new venture, whether it's outside or inside the business, it's a child. And you don't put a 40-pound pack on a 6-year-old's back when you take her hiking.

Ideas are like frog eggs: you've got to lay a thousand to hatch one.

Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don't have enough of it, you're out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you're really missing something.

The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes...otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.

The better a man is the more mistakes will he make – for the more new things he will try.

Any time I have seen someone accomplishing something magnificent, they have been a monomaniac with a mission. A single-minded individual with a passion.

Spontaneity is an infinite number of rehearsed possibilities.

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

One does not "manage" people. The task is to lead people.

You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.

Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.

To arrive at the definition of the problem he must begin by finding the 'critical factor'. This is the element (or elements) in the situation that has to be changed before anything else can be changed, moved, acted upon.

It’s up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.

Unless a decision has degenerated into work, it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.

Thus, for those who are willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovation opportunity.

Most organizations staff their problems & starve their opportunities.

There are companies that are good at improving what they're already doing. There are companies that are good at extending what they're doing. And finally there are companies that are good at innovation. Every large company has to be able to do all three - improve, extend, and innovate - simultaneously.

But innovation is more than a new method. It is a new view of the universe, as one of risk rather than of chance or of certainty. It is a new view of man's role in the universe; he creates order by taking risks. And this means that innovation, rather than being an assertion of human power, is an acceptance of human responsibility.

Strategic management is not a box of tricks or a bundle of techniques. It is analytical thinking and commitment of resources to action. But quantification alone is not planning. Some of the most important issues in strategic management cannot be quantified at all.

There are no creeds in mathematics.

Culture eats Christianity for breakfast.

A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.

The most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question.

Too many leaders try to do a little bit of 25 things and get nothing done. They are very popular because they always say yes. But they get nothing done.

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.

Leaders shouldn?t attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can?t compromise.

It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.

The Pertinent Question is NOT how to do things right - but how to find the right things to do, and to concentrate resources and efforts on them.

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

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

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

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

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it.

People are effective because they say 'no,' because they say, 'this isn't for me.'

Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.

The healthier a new venture and the faster it grows, the more financial feeding it requires.

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside.The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a satisfied patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise there are only costs.

Business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.

Defending yesterday is far more risky than making tomorrow.