Peter Drucker Quotes

“Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business - in demographics, in values, in technology or science - and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.”

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

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

“Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined.”

“The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.”

“Ideas are somewhat like babies - they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, "This is a damn-fool idea." Instead they ask, "What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?"”

“Replace your pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution.”

“Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.”

“Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.”

“Business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.”

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

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

“Success? Odd as it seems, you will achieve the greates results in business and career if you drop the word 'achievement' from your vocabulary and replace it with 'contribution'.”

“Results is all that separates one company from another.”

“Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.”

“Business is society's change agent.”

“Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.”

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

“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.”

“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 fundamental reality for every worker, from sweeper to executive vice-president, is the eight hours or so that he spends on the job. In our society of organizations, it is the job through which the great majority has access to achievement, to fulfillment, and to community.”

“Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”

“The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.”

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

“For new technology to replace old, it has to have at least ten times the benefit.”