Peter Drucker Quotes

“It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.”

“In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise.”

“The leader sees leadership as responsibility rather than as rank and privilege.”

“There are two types of people in the business community: those who produce results and those who give you reasons why they didn't.”

“Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes - it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.”

“Decisions of the kind the executive has to make are not made well by acclamation. They are made well only if based on the clash of conflicting views...The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.”

“To make a living is no longer enough. Work also has to make a life.”

“The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.”

“If a government commission had worked on the horse, you would have the first horse that could operate its knee joint in both directions. The trouble is it couldn't have stood up.”

“There is an unbroken chain of opposition to the introduction of economic freedom and to the capitalist autonomy of the economic sphere... In every case the opposition could only be overcome - peacefully or by force - because of the promise of capitalism to establish equality... That this promise was an illusion we all know.”

“What managers decide to stop doing is often more important than what they decide to do.”

“The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.”

“You must accept that if the computer is a tool, it is the job of tool user to know what to use it for.”

“The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.”

“Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.”

“For the social ecologist language is not "communication." It is not just "message." It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communication. ...Social ecologists need not be "great" writers; but they have to be respectful writers, caring writers.”

“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.”

“The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him.”

“Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual. They fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.”

“Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.”

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

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

“We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”

“Every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise.”

“No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.”