Peter Drucker Quotes

Succession planning often results in the selection of a weaker representation of yourself.

If you want it, measure it. If you can't measure it, forget it.

Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.

The bеѕt wау tо predict уоur future іѕ tо create it.

The only real difference between one organization and another is the performance of its people.

Working with people is difficult, but not impossible.

We can ill afford to have activities conducted as "non-profit," that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.

A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.

Concentration is the key to economic results. No other principle of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration.... Our motto seems to be, "Let's do a little bit of everything."

History has been written not by the most talented but by the most motivated.

A business enterprise must continue beyond the lifetime of the individual or of the generation to be capable of producing its contributions to economy and to society.

Systematic change requires a willingness to look on change as an opportunity.

What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady and continuous.

If general perception changes from seeing the glass as 'half-full' to seeing it as 'half empty' there are major innovative opportunities.

Our job in life is to make a positive difference, not prove we're right.

Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing.

What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.

Ideas are cheap and abundant; what is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.

Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations... They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.'

Strategic planning is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial (risk-taking) decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity; organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions; and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback.

There is a point at which a transformation has to take place.

You can't manage what you don't measure.

The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission.

Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability and to prevent, or at least slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work - on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself - it must be organized for constant change.

All good strategy eventually degenerates into work.

The ultimate resource in economic development is people. It is people, not capital or raw materials that develop an economy.

Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up.

The best plan is only a plan... unless it degerates into work.

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

Salvation by society failed the most where it promised the most, in the communist countries. But it also failed in the West. Practically no government program enacted since the 1950s in the Western world - or in the communist countries - has been successful.

Understanding our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong -- these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of knowledge workers.

Time is the scarcest resource.

I no longer think that learning how to manage people, especially subordinates, is the most important for executives to learn. I am teaching above all else, how to manage oneself.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works.

I'm a writer. I could not or would not ever run a business. I don't even have a secretary. And contrary to some of the stereotypes, entrepreneurs are not loners. I am.

In the managerial organization, the top people sit in judgment; in the innovative organization it is their job to encourage ideas, no matter how unripe or crude.

The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the MANUAL WORKER in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.

No business can do everything. Even if it has the money, it will never have enough good people. It has to set priorities. The worst thing to do is a little bit of everything. This makes sure that nothing is being accomplished. It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.

One can either work or meet. One cannot do both at the same time.

As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it.

Every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.

Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.

Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but the test of their validity.

Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.

Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.