Peter Drucker Quotes

As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.

Do the right things instead of trying to do everything right.

Teamwork is neither "good" nor "desirable." It is a fact. Wherever people work together or play together they do so as a team. Which team to use for what purpose is a crucial, difficult and risky decision that is even harder to unmake. Managements have yet to learn how to make it.

What gets measured gets managed.

Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.

No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility.

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance... Any attempt to go beyond that is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no "loyalty," he owes no "love" and no "attitudes" - he owes performance and nothing else. .... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.

People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

The largest 100 corporations hold 25 percent of the worldwide productive assets, which in turn control 75 percent of international trade and 98 percent of all foreign direct investment.The multinational corporation...puts the economic decision beyond the effective reach of the political process and its decision-makers, national governments.

No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary people perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each person's strength to help all the other members perform.

Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are manual labor.

If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.

There is no reason to believe that the people who staff the managerial and professional positions in our service institutions are any less qualified, any less competent or honest, or any less hard-working than the men who manage businesses. Conversely, there is no reason to believe that business managers, put in control of service institutions, would do better than the 'bureaucrats'. Indeed, we know that they immediately become bureaucrats themselves.

The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.

Knowledge applied is productivity.

It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem - which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.

Conductors do not know how the oboe does its work, but they know what the oboe should contribute.

If you want to know what the future is, be part of its development.

Leadership is all about getting results.

There is the general belief that the corporation income tax is a tax on the "rich" and on the "fat cats." But with pension funds owning 30% of American large business-and soon to own 50%-the corporation income tax, in effect, eases the load on those in top income brackets and penalizes the beneficiaries of pension funds.

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.

No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.

As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel.

Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong... And yet, a person can perform only from strength.

Vision without execution is delusion. The joy is in the results

Fortunately or unfortunately, the one predictable thing in any organization is the crisis. That always comes. That's when you do depend on the leader: The job of the leader is to build an organization that is battle-ready, that has high morale, that knows how to behave, that trusts itself, and where people trust one another.

Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant

True marketing starts...with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?" It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"

Follow effective action with quiet reflection.

What is the manager's job? It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite - and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to problems rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results.

...because knowledge rapidly deteriorates unless it is used constantly, maintaining within an organization an activity that is used only intermittently guarantees incompetence.

Knowledge is being applied to knowledge itself. It is now fast becoming the one factor in production, sidelining both capital and labour.

Increasingly, politics is not about "who gets what, when, how" but about values, each of them considered to be absolute. Politics is about "the right to life"...It is about the environment. It is about gaining equality for groups alleged to be oppressed...None of these issues is economic. All are fundamentally moral.

If a manager spends more than 10 percent of his time on "human relations" the group is probably too large.

The next thing to be said about what long-range planning is not, is that it does not deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions. Decisions exist only in the present. The question that faces the long-range planner is not what we should do tomorrow.

The most important work of the executive is to identify the changes that have already happened. The important thing . . . is to exploit the changes that have already occurred and to use them as opportunities.

Information is the manager's main tool, indeed the manager's capital, and it is he who must decide what information he needs and how to use it.

To succeed in this new world, we will have to learn, first, who we are. Few people, even highly successful people, can answer the questions, Do you know what you're good at? Do you know what you need to learn so that you get the full benefit of your strengths? Few have even asked themselves these questions.

Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise.

Look upon every obstacle as part payment towards your success.

The organization is, above all, social. It is people.

The greatest challenge to organizations is the balance between continuity and change. You need both. At different times, the balance is slightly more over here, or slightly more over there, but you need both. And balance is basically the greatest task in leadership. Organizations have to have continuity, and yet if there is not enough new challenge, not enough change, they become empty bureaucracies, awfully fast.

Strong people have strong weaknesses.

All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.

Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?

No one has ever failed to find the facts they are looking for.