Peter Drucker Quotes

You can't manage knowledge.Knowledge is between two ears and only between two ears.

We will have to learn to lead people rather then to contain them.

The Welfare State, which begun in Imperial Germany for the truly indigent and disabled, has now become "everybody's entitlement" and an increasing burden on those who produce.

In the next economic downturn there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the supercorporate chieftains who pay themselves millions. In every major economic downturn in US history the villains have been the heroes during the preceding boom.

Once the facts are clear the decisions jump out at you.

Great wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.

We've spent the last 30 years focusing on the T in IT, and we'll spend the next 30 years focusing on the I.

If you can't measure it, you can't change it.

The most effective way to manage change is to create it.

There is a great need for a new approach, new methods and new tools in teaching, man's oldest and most reactionary craft. There is great need for a rapid increase in the productivity of learning. There is, above all, great need for methods that will make the teacher effective and multiply his or her efforts and competence. Teaching is, in fact, the only traditional craft in which we have not yet fashioned the tools that make an ordinary person capable of superior performance. In this respect, teaching is far behind medicine, where the tools first became available a century or more ago.

Most of what you hear about entrepreneurshi p is all wrong. It's not magic; it's not mysterious; and it has nothing to do with genes. It's a discipline and, like any discipline, it can be learned.

The computer, being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data.

In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.

The single minded ones, the monomaniacs, are the only true achievers

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

Yet there is nothing more dangerous than to be premature in exploiting a change in perception.

Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change

To make the future demands courage. It demands work. But it also demands faith.

Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.

I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information.

There are only two things in a business that make money - innovation and marketing, everything else is cost.

The fruit of your work grows on other people's trees

Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.

To make a living is no longer enough. Work also has to make a life.

Mother Teresa's numerical results were not her greatest contribution. Instead, she made the world-and especially India-conscious of compassion.

I have been saying for many years that we are using the word 'guru' only because 'charlatan' is too long to fit into a headline.

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

Above all, innovation is not invention. It is a term of economics rather than of technology.

Communication always makes demands. It always demands that the recipient become somebody, do something, believe something. It always appeals to motivation.

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

"The area in which the executive first encounters the challenge of strength is in staffing. The effective executive fills positions and promotes on the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to minimize weaknesses but to maximize strength."

No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.

The one to distrust is the person who never makes a mistake, never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried and the trivial.

The monomaniac is unlikely to succeed. Most leave only their bleached bones in the roadless desert. But the rest of us, with our multiple interests instead of a single mission, are certain to fail and have no impact at all.

Unless strategy evaluation is performed seriously and systematically, and unless strategists are willing to act on the results, energy will be used up defending yesterday.

What's measured improves

A fundamental responsibility of leadership is make sure that everybody knows the mission, understands it, lives it.

The only industries that function well are the industries that take responsibility for training. The Japanese, you know, assume that when you first come to work you know absolutely nothing. School isn't preparation for work and never was.

We have tried to substitute mass for purpose. We have tried to regain military potency of defense by making it gigantic, unwieldy, complex. It never works.

Mission defines strategy, and strategy defines structure.

Business exists to supply goods and services to customers and economic surplus to society, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers or even dividends to shareholders.

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old

An employer has no business with a man's personality... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.

The large organization has to learn to innovate, or it won't survive.

The true business of every company is to make and keep customers.

There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.