Peter Drucker Quotes

“Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”

“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.”

“To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent”

“Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.”

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

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

“To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.”

“Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen.”

“It is commonly believed that innovations create changes - but few ever do. Successful innovations exploit changes that have already happened.”

“There are companies that are good at improving what they're already doing. There are companies that are good at extending what they're doing. And finally there are companies that are good at innovation. Every large company has to be able to do all three - improve, extend, and innovate - simultaneously.”

“Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.”

“Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. SO for more than 60 years I have kept studying one subject at a time.”

“Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time.”

“The great mystery isn't that people do things badly but that they occasionally do a few things well. The only thing that is universal is incompetence. Strength is always specific! Nobody ever commented, for example, that the great violinist Jascha Heifetz probably couldn't play the trumpet very well.”

“Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.”

“A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.”

“The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.”

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

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

“Few relationships are as critical to the business enterprise as the relationship to the government. Managers have responsibility for this relationship as part of their responsibility to the enterprise itself. It is an area of social impact of the business. To a large extent the relationship to government results from what businesses do or fail to do.”

“Marketing and innovation make money. Everything else is a cost.”

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

“To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.”

“Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer's point of view.”

“It's more important to do the right thing than to do things right.”