Peter Drucker Quotes

“The race for Quality has no finish line - so technically, it's more like a death march. Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”

“The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.”

“Keep the boss aware. Bosses, after all, are held responsible by their own bosses for the performance of their subordinates. They must be able to say: "I know what Anne [or John] is trying to do."”

“Management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.”

“Tomorrow always arrives. It is always different. And even the mightiest company is in trouble if it has not worked on the future. Being surprised by what happens is a risk that even the largest and richest company cannot afford, and even the smallest business need not run.”

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

“Listening (the first competence of leadership) is not a skill, it is a discipline. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.”

“I have no interest in celebrities. If all the superrich disappeared, the world economy would not even notice. The superrich are irrelevant to the economy.”

“Spontaneity is an infinite number of rehearsed possibilities.”

“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.”

“The enterprise can fulfill its human and social functions only if it prospers as a business.”

“The next thing to be said about what long-range planning is not, is that it does not deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions. Decisions exist only in the present. The question that faces the long-range planner is not what we should do tomorrow.”

“Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise.”

“In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for"... On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to [by both] the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration.”

“All good strategy eventually degenerates into work.”

“Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills - accounting and what have you - but you can't teach them management.”

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

“The computer is a moron.”

“Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise.”

“The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”

“The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes...otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.”

“Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.”

“One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.”

“Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don't have enough of it, you're out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you're really missing something.”

“Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.”