Peter Drucker Quotes

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

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

Systematic decision review also shows executives their own weaknesses, particularly the areas in which they are simply incompetent. In these areas, smart executives don't make decisions or take actions. They delegate.

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

Every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.

There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.

Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are a means to mobilize resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.

Decision making is the specific executive task.

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.

Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions.

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

We do not need more laws . No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model .

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."

There's nothing so useless than executing a task efficiently when it actually never should have been executed at all.

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.

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

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

The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. She therefore makes sure she puts into the leadership position, into the standard-setting, the performance-making position the person who has the strength to do the outstanding pacesetting job. This always requires focus on the one strength of a person and dismissal of weaknesses as irrelevant unless they hamper the full deployment of the available strength.

Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society – and especially in the economy – as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. This is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur.

Listening is not a skill; it is a discipline.

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

They wrongly believe that good intentions move mountains. Bulldozers move mountains. But there are exceptions.

If a business is to be considered a continuous process, instead of a series of disjointed stop-and-go events, then the economic universe in which a business operates-and all the major events within it-must have rhyme, rhythm, or reason.

Leadership is more doing than dash.

Management and entrepreneurship are only two different dimensions of the same task. An entrepreneur who does not learn how to manage will not last long. A management that does not learn to innovate will not last long.

Focus on opportunities, not problems.

The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.

Business has only two basic functions - marketing and innovation.

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.

There are usually half a dozen right answers to what needs to bedone. Yet, unless a person makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing.

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

Knowledge is information that changes somethingor somebody - either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making anindividual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action.

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

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

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

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."

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

Schools will change more in the next 30 years than they have since the invention of the printed book.

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.

Successful people know they need to get many things done-and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate their time and energy on doing one thing at a time-and on doing first things firs.

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.

The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves.

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

[Entrepreneurship] is by no means hunch or gamble. But it also is not precisely science. Rather, it is judgment.

Adversarial power relationships only work if you never have to see or work with the bastards again.

Look at government programs for the past fifty years. Every single one - except warfare - achieved the exact opposite of its announced goal.

Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.

[T]hroughout the ages to be educated meant to be unproductive.... our word "school" - and its equivalent in all European languages - derives from a Greek word meaning "leisure.

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.

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

Objectives can be compared to a compass bearing by which a ship navigates. A compass bearing is firm, but in actual navigation, a ship may veer off its course for many miles. Without a compass bearing, a ship would neither find its port nor be able to estimate the time required to get there.

The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things.

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

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.

I think the growth industry of the future in this country and the world will soon be the continuing education of adults. ...I think the educated person of the future is somebody who realizes the need to continue to learn. That is the new definition and it is going to change the world we live in and work in.

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

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.

During periods of discontinuous, abrupt change, the essence of adaptation involves a keen sensitivity to what should be abandoned - not what should be changed or introduced. A willingness to depart from the familiar has distinct survival value.