Top 700 Peter Drucker Quotes On Management (2023)
1. “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker
2. “This is the “secret” of those people who “do so many things” and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.”
3. “The future requires decisions-now. It imposes risk-now. It requires action-now.” – Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1974
4. “The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind, is engaged in the work.”
5. “If you have more than five goals, you have none.” – The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization, 2008
6. “Innovation is thus not only opportunity. It is not only risk. It is first and foremost responsibility.” – Landmarks of Tomorrow, 1959
7. “We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.”
8. “Entrepreneurs see change as the norm and as healthy.” – Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1985
9. “Any attempt to base today’s actions and commitments on predictions of future events is futile.” – Managing for Results, 1964
10. “What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that’s another matter.” – Peter Drucker
11. “Managers are action-focused; they are not philosophers and should not be.”
12. “The entrepreneur,’ said the French economist J. B. Say around 1800, ‘shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.’ But Say’s definition does not tell us who this ‘entrepreneur’ is. And since Say coined the term almost two hundred years ago, there has been total confusion over the definitions of ‘entrepreneur’ and”
13. “The secret is that effective executives make the strengths of the boss productive.”
14. “We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out.” – Peter Drucker Quotes on Opportunity
15. “The key to greatness is to look for people’s potential and spend time developing it.”
16. “right conduct can never be established by procedure.”
17. “Ideas are cheap and abundant; what is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.” – Peter Drucker
18. “What do we know about developing people? Quite a bit, We certainly know what not to do. First, one does not try to build upon people’s weaknesses.”
19. “Any organisation develops people; it either forms them or deforms them.”
20. “An organization is an organ of society and fulfills itself by the contribution it makes to the outside environment.”
21. “The most important thing about priorities and posteriorities is not intelligent analysis but courage.”
22. “1. Innovation is work. It requires knowledge. It often requires great ingenuity. There are clearly people who are more talented innovators than the rest of us. Also, innovators rarely work in more than one area. For all his tremendous innovative capacity, Edison worked only in the electrical field. And an innovator in financial areas, Citibank in New York, for instance, is unlikely to embark on innovations in retailing or health care.”
23. “But there seems to be little correlation between a man’s effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination or his knowledge.”
24. “We can say with certainty – or 90% probability – that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.” — Peter Drucker
25. “Los grupos sociales dirigentes de la sociedad del saber serán "los trabajadores del saber" , ejecutivos que saben como aplicar el saber a un uso productivo, al igual que los capitalistas sabían como aplicar capital a un uso productivo: profesionales del saber, empleados del saber.”
26. “To supply data is not enough. The data have to be integrated with strategy, they have to test a company’s assumptions, and they must challenge a company’s current outlook. One”
27. “expected to get the right things done.”
28. “The aim of strategic planning is action now.”
29. “Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity.” – Peter Drucker
30. “If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.” Peter Drucker
31. “There is nothing worse than doing the wrong thing well.”
32. “Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves—their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.” - Peter Drucker, management consultant, educator, and author
33. “Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window. ”
34. “The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do, but the absence of doing it.” – Peter Drucker
35. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
36. “Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results. And for these, the size of the group and the magnitude of the managerial job are not even symptoms.”
37. “The companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under.”
38. “A crisis that recurs a second time is a crisis that must not occur again.”
39. “a decision without an alternative is a desperate gambler’s throw,”
40. “De minimis non curat praetor (The magistrate does not consider trifles) said the Roman law almost two thousand years ago—but many decision-makers still need to learn it.”
41. “The relevant question is not simply what shall we do tomorrow, but rather what shall we do today in order to get ready for tomorrow.” Peter Drucker
42. “The task of an executive is not to change human beings. Rather, as the Bible tells us in the parable of the Talents, the task is to multiply performance capacity of the whole by putting to use whatever strength, whatever health, whatever aspiration there is in individuals.”
43. “Planning tries to optimize tomorrow the trends of today. Strategy aims to exploit the new and different opportunities of tomorrow.” – Managing in Turbulent Times, 1980
44. “What gets measured gets managed.”
45. “Executives are not paid for doing things they like to do. They are paid for getting the right things done—most of all in their specific task, the making of effective decisions.”
46. “To exploit the opportunity for innovation offered by unexpected success requires analysis. Unexpected success is a symptom. But a symptom of what? The underlying phenomenon may be nothing more than a limitation on our own vision, knowledge, and understanding.”
47. “while almost every large organization has an appraisal procedure, few of them actually use it.”
48. “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.” Peter Drucker
49. “Effectiveness as an executive demands doing certain—and fairly simple—things.”
50. “No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.”
51. “No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.” – Best Peter Drucker Quotes
52. “Managing yourself requires taking responsibility for relationships.”
53. “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.”
54. “One cannot hire a hand—the whole man always comes with it,”
55. “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” Peter Drucker
56. “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.” – Peter Drucker Sayings
57. “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.” – Peter Drucker
58. “Spellman often said that during his waking hours he was alone only twice each day, for 25 minutes each time:”
59. “The danger is that executives will become contemptuous of information and stimulus that cannot be reduced to computer logic and computer language. Executives may become blind to everything that is perception (i.e., event) rather than fact (i.e., after the event). The tremendous amount of computer information may thus shut out access to reality.”
60. “Unexpected successes and unexpected failure have so far been discussed as occurring within a business or an industry. But outside events, that is, events that are not recorded in the information and the figures by which a management steers its institution, are just as important. Indeed, they often are more important.”
61. “Business has only two basic functions – marketing and innovation.”
62. “Long range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.”
63. “1. The first is simply not to try to be clever. Innovations have to be handled by ordinary human beings, if they are to attain any size and importance at all, by morons or near-morons. Incompetence, after all, is the only thing in abundant and never-failing supply. Anything too clever, whether in design or execution, is almost bound to fail.”
64. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
65. “Resolving these problems by a common code of behavior is the only way to make the multinational what it should and could be: a powerful instrument for economic strength and political harmony. The problems are largely political and legal. But they are problems which it is the duty—and the opportunity—of top management in the multinationals to think through. Otherwise, it is safe to predict, political solutions will be imposed on the multinationals which can only damage them and the world economy.”
66. “Energy, resources, and time should go instead to making a competent person into a star performer.”
67. “Can we really do something right away to bring about the kind of future we desire?”
68. “Time is also a unique resource. Of the other major resources, money is actually quite plentiful. We long ago should have learned that it is the demand for capital, rather than the supply thereof, which sets the limit to economic growth and activity. People—the third limiting resource—one can hire, though one can rarely hire enough good people. But one cannot rent, hire, buy, or otherwise obtain more time. The”
69. “The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner’s job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one’s own property.”
70. “Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform and not to please their superiors. They know that it does not matter how many tantrums a prima donna throws as long as she brings in the customers.”
71. “The first policy-and the foundation for all the others- is to abandon yesterday.” – Management Challenges for the 21st Century, 1999
72. “To make the future demands courage.” – Managing for Results, 1964
73. “As a rule, theory does not precede practice. Its role is to structure and codify already proven practice. Its role is to convert the isolated and “atypical” from exception to “rule” and “system,” and therefore into something that can be learned and taught and, above all, into something that can be generally applied.”
74. “Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.”
75. “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” – Peter Drucker on Management and Leadership
76. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” – Peter Drucker
77. “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” — Peter Drucker
78. “3. Individual self-development in large measure depends on the focus on contributions. The man who asks of himself, “What is the most important contribution I can make to the performance of this organization?” asks in effect, “What self-development do I need? What knowledge and skill do I have to acquire to make the contribution I should be making? What strengths do I have to put to work? What standards do I have to set myself?” 4.”
79. “The bеѕt wау tо predict уоur future іѕ tо create it.” Peter Drucker
80. “Good follow-up is just as important as the meeting itself.”
81. “No member will make a decision with regard to a matter for which he does not have primary responsibility. Should such a matter be brought to him, he will refer it to the colleague whose primary responsibility it is. Indeed it is a wise precaution for members of the top-management team not even to have an opinion on matters that are not within their own areas of primary responsibility.”
82. “Anyone who knows Western businesses, government agencies, or educational institutions knows that their managers make far too many small decisions as a rule. And nothing causes as much trouble in an organization as a lot of small decisions.”
83. “This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship - the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”
84. “We need to encourage habits of flexibility, of continuous learning, and of acceptance of change as normal and as opportunity - for institutions as well as for individuals.”
85. “Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
86. “In what areas would it make little difference whether we perform excellently or poorly?”
87. “But what stands out in Japanese history, as well as in today’s Japanese management behavior, is the capacity for making 180-degree turns—that is, for reaching radical and highly controversial decisions.”
88. “3. Finally, don’t try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present! An innovation may have long-range impact; it may not reach its full maturity until twenty years later.”
89. “First-rate engineers, for instance, tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human beings, they believe, are much too disorderly for the good engineering mind. Human resources professionals, by contrast, often pride themselves on their ignorance of elementary accounting or of quantitative methods altogether. But taking pride in such ignorance is self-defeating. Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.”
90. “During the process that precedes the decision, no mention is made of what the answer might be. This is done so that people will not be forced to take sides; once they have taken sides, a decision would be a victory for one side and a defeat for the other. Thus the whole process is focused on finding out what the decision is really about, not what the decision should be. Its result is a meeting of the minds that there is (or is not) a need for a change in behavior.”
91. “Management by drive, like management by ‘bellows and meat ax,’ is a sure sign of confusion. It is an admission of incompetence. It is a sign that management does not know how to plan. But, above all, it is a sign that the company does not know what to expect of its managers – that, not knowing how to direct them, it misdirects them.”
92. “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action. ” – Peter Drucker
93. “The brilliant insight is not by itself achievement”
94. “Marketing is not a function, it is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view.”
95. “Without an action plan, the executive becomes a prisoner of events.”
96. “We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.” – Peter Drucker
97. “As the influential management thinker Peter Drucker taught, the best—perhaps even the only—way to predict the future is to create it.10” ― James C. Collins, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All
98. “A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.”
99. “A man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths. The man who always knows what people cannot do, but never sees what they can do, will undermine the spirit of the organisation. Of course, a manager should have a clear grasp of the limitations of his people, but he should see these as limitations on what they can do, and as a challenge to them to do better.”
100. “Technology” does not necessarily mean “science and engineering.” Techne, the Greek word from which “technology” derives, means, after all, “useful knowledge,” or “organized skill,” rather than “engineering.”
101. “Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.”
102. “I’m always asked how I know what kind of organisation to accept as a client. When you walk through the door, you know in two minutes whether they enjoy it. And if they don’t enjoy it, then I’d rather not work for them. But if they like it and they feel tomorrow is going to be better – that creates a totally different climate.”
103. “There are hidden opportunities in developments that seem to threaten a business or an industry.” – Managing for Results, 1964
104. “If you want to predict the future create it.”
105. “…no human being can possibly predict the future, let alone control it.”
106. “this book itself is not a book on what people at the top do or should do. It is addressed to everyone who, as a knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization.”
107. “It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem - which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.”
108. “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker, Author and Educator in Modern Management Education
109. “The task of an executive is not to change human beings. Rather as the Bible tells us in the parable of the talents, the task is to multiply the performance capacity of the whole by putting to use whatever strength, whatever health, whatever aspiration there is in individuals.”
110. “Tiêu chuẩn của một nhóm người bất kỳ được xác định bởi thành tích của người đứng đầu. Do vậy mà nhà quản lý không bao giờ để cho thành tích của mình dựa trên điều gì khác ngoài điểm mạnh cả [...]
111. “Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.” — Peter Drucker
112. “The "non-profit" institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its "product" is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their "product" is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.”
113. “But a company which wants economic results has to have leadership in something of real value to a customer or market. It may be in one narrow but important aspect of the product line, it may be in its service, it may be in its distribution, or it may be in its ability to convert ideas into salable products on the market speedily and at low cost.”
114. “The earlier changes are discerned, the earlier the opportunities they create can be converted into innovations.”
115. “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.”
116. “Effectiveness is, after all, not a «subject», but a selfdiscipline.”
117. “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.” – Peter Drucker
118. “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.” – Peter Drucker
119. “Do what you do best, and outsource the rest.”
120. “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.” ~ Peter Drucker
121. “The question to ask is not “What is top management?” The question is “What are the specific things to be done in this business which are of crucial importance to the success and survival of the business and which can be done only by top management?”
122. “If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.” He may be an excellent man. But he is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved. What the executive needs are criteria which enable him to work on the truly important, that is, on contributions and results, even though the criteria are not found in the flow of events.”
123. “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
124. “Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable.”
125. “Culture—no matter how defined—is singularly persistent.”
126. “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”
127. “Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.” – Peter Drucker
128. “Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.” – Peter Drucker
129. “Concept of the Corporation.”
130. “A family member in a family business has a position of authority and power, regardless of his title and rank, even regardless of his job. He has the inside track to the top—as a son, a brother, a brother-in-law. No matter what his rank, he is top management. If he cannot command the respect due a member of top management on his own merit and on the basis of his performance, he should not be allowed to stay on the payroll.”
131. “A recurrent crisis should always have been foreseen. It can therefore either be prevented or reduced to a routine which clerks can manage. The definition of a “routine” is that it makes unskilled people without judgment capable of doing what it took near-genius to do before; for a routine puts down in systematic, step-by-step form what a very able man learned in surmounting yesterday’s crisis. The recurrent crisis is not confined to the lower levels of an organization. It afflicts everyone.”
132. “Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.” – Peter Drucker
133. “An excess of meetings indicates that jobs have not been defined clearly, have not been structured big enough, have not been made truly responsible. Also the need for meetings indicates that the decisions and relations analyses either have not been made at all or have not been applied. The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.”
134. “What’s measured improves.”
135. “Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable.” – Peter Drucker
136. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” — Peter Drucker
137. “Around here, I am only the guy who is responsible. If these men don’t know what to do when they run into an enemy in the jungle, I’m too far away to tell them. My job is to make sure they know. What they do depends on the situation which only they can judge. The responsibility is always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot.” In”
138. “The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behaviour is meaningless data”
139. “Effective leadership–and again this is very old wisdom–is not based on being clever; it is based primarily on being consistent.”
140. “The critical feature of a knowledge workforce is that its workers are not labor, they are capital.” – “They’re Not Employees; They’re People,” Harvard Business Review, February 2002
141. “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.” – Peter Drucker Quotes on Decision Making
142. “If you have more than five goals, you have none.”
143. “Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.” –Peter Drucker
144. “Note that the question is not “What do I want to do?” Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success.”
145. “The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things.” Peter Drucker
146. “The incongruity between perceived and actual reality typically characterizes a whole industry or a whole service area. The solution, however, should again be small and simple, focused and highly specific.”
147. “The knowledge worker is not poverty-prone. He is in danger of alienation, to use the fashionable word for boredom, frustration, and silent despair.”
148. “If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.”
149. “Managements are paid for their judgment, but they are not being paid to be infallible. In fact, they are being paid to realize and admit that they have been wrong – especially when their admission opens up an opportunity. But this is by no means common.”
150. “1. What is our mission? 2. Who is our customer? 3. What does the customer value? 4. What are our results? 5. What is our plan?2”
151. “It is incumbent on the people who work with them to observe them, to find out how they work, and to adapt themselves to what makes their bosses most effective. This, in fact, is the secret of “managing” the boss.”
152. “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Peter Drucker
153. “Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.”
154. “Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.”
155. “The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.” – Peter Drucker
156. “The action plan is a statement of intentions rather than a commitment. It must not become a straitjacket. It should be revised often, because every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.”
157. “The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system’s weaknesses irrelevant.”
158. “Do we really believe in the idea? Do we really want to be that kind of people, do thatkind of work, run that kind of business?
159. “Exploiting opportunities produces results.”
160. “Learning and teaching are going to be more deeply affected by the new availability of information than any other area of human life.” – The Age of Discontinuity, 1969
161. “Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself – not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.” – Peter Drucker
162. “A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.” – Peter Drucker
163. “What major change in the economy, market, or knowledge would enable our company to conduct business the way we really would like to do it, the way we would really obtain economic results?”
164. “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker
165. “The new information technology… Internet and e-mail… have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.” — Peter Drucker
166. “Làm một cái gì đó mới mẻ dù lớn hay nhỏ thì độ rủi ro cũng là như nhau. Chuyển một cơ hội thành một kết quả bao giờ cũng có lợi hơn là việc giải quyết một vấn đề - tức là việc duy trì trạng thái cân bằng của quá khứ.
167. “A business exists to create a customer”
168. “The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker, but of the manager.” — Peter Drucker
169. “The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.”
170. “Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work.”
171. “Leadership is not magnetic personality–that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not making friends and influencing people –that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.” – Peter Drucker
172. “One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.” – Management Challenges for the 21st Century, 1999
173. “Listening for the signal that it is time to change is an essential skill for self-development.” – Managing the Non-Profit Organization, 1990
174. “There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”
175. “Human existence is possible as existence not in despair, as existence not in tragedy—it is possible as existence in faith. The opposite of Sin—to use the traditional term for existence purely in society—is not virtue; it is faith. Faith is the belief that in God the impossible is possible, that in Him time and eternity are one, that both life and death are meaningful. In my favorite among Kierkegaard’s books, a little volume called Fear and Trembling[published in 1843],”
176. “The best way to predict your future is to create it.”
177. “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”
178. “Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.”
179. “We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.” – Peter Drucker Quotes on Learning
180. “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.”
181. “The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers.
182. “There is nothing as useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
183. “Focus on opportunities, not problems.” Peter Drucker
184. “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”
185. “The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic requirements of effective human relations: communications; teamwork; self-development; and development of others.”
186. “People inevitably start out with an opinion; to ask them to search for the facts first is even undesirable. They will simply do what everyone is far too prone to do anyhow: look for the facts that fit the conclusion they have already reached.”
187. “Increasingly, the true investment in the knowledge society is not in machines and tools. It is in the knowledge of the knowledge worker.” – “The Age of Social Transformation,” The Atlantic, November 1994
188. “Entrepreneurs see change as the norm and as healthy. Usually, they do not bring about the change themselves. But – and this defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship – the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”
189. “Behind the incongruity between actual and perceived reality, there always lies an element of intellectual arrogance, of intellectual rigour and dogmatism. ‘It is I, not they, who know what poor people can afford’, the Japanese industrialist in effect asserted. ‘People behave according to economic rationality, as every good Marxist knows,’ as Khrushchev implied. This explains why the incongruity is so easily exploited by innovators: they are left alone and undisturbed.”
190. “Entrepreneurship is "risky" mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.”
191. “Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service.”
192. “Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.” - Peter Drucker
193. “Values, in other words, are and should be the ultimate test.”
194. “But it is meaningless to speak of short-range and long-range plans. There are plans that lead to action today—and they are true plans, true strategic decisions. And there are plans that talk about action tomorrow—they are dreams, if not pretexts for nonthinking, nonplanning, nondoing. The”
195. “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.” – Peter Drucker
196. “There are just two questions to ask to attain success in business: First, “What business am I in?” Second, “How’s business?” – Peter Drucker Quotes on Business
197. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t change it.” Peter Drucker
198. “Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.”
199. “The computer is a moron.” — Peter Drucker
200. “We need a new concept of information and a new understanding of learning and teaching.” – The Age of Discontinuity, 1969
201. “People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant stature—without any more effort than is expended by the nonachievers.”
202. “Direct results always come first. In the care and feeding of an organization, they play the role calories play in the nutrition of the human body.”
203. “Peter Drucker once observed that the drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.35”
204. “Performance in management, therefore, means in large measure doing a good job of preparing today’s business for the future.” – Managing in Turbulent Times, 1980
205. “But everyone who can face up to decision making can learn to be an entrepreneur and to behave entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurship, then, is behaviour rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.”
206. “Problems have to be taken care of, of course; they must not be swept under the rug.”
207. “Knowledge is useless to executives until it has been translated into deeds.” – “What Makes an Effective Executive,” Harvard Business Review, June 2004
208. “Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.”
209. “They are, therefore, not overly impressed by speed in decision-making. Rather they consider virtuosity in manipulating a great many variables a symptom of sloppy thinking. They want to know what the decision is all about and what the underlying realities are which it has to satisfy. They want impact rather than technique, they want to be sound rather than clever.”
210. “Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.” – Peter Drucker
211. “Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.” – Peter Drucker Quotes on Business
212. “Effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively.” – Peter Drucker
213. “the best definition of “what our business is, will be, and should be,” will remain a pious platitude. Energy will be used up in defending yesterday. No one will have the time, resources, or will to work on exploiting today, let alone to work on making tomorrow.”
214. “Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” – Peter Drucker Quotes on Marketing and Innovation
215. “Good executives focus on opportunities rather than problems.” – The Effective Executive, 2004
216. “Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.”
217. “A decision has not been made until people know: • the name of the person accountable for carrying it out; • the deadline; • the names of the people who will be affected by the decision and therefore have to know about, understand, and approve it—or at least not be strongly opposed to it; and • the names of the people who have to be informed of the decision, even if they are not directly affected by it.”
218. “What makes demographics such a rewarding opportunity for the entrepreneur is precisely its neglect by decision makers, whether businessmen, public-service staffs, or governmental policymakers. They still cling to the assumption that demographics do not change – or do not change fast. Indeed, they reject even the plainest evidence of demographic changes.”
219. “Listen first, speak last.”
220. “In actual practice this distinction makes no sense whatever. An enterprise, whether a business or any other institution, that does not innovate and does not engage in entrepreneurship will not survive long.”
221. “in its people decisions, management must demonstrate that it realizes that integrity is one absolute requirement of a manager, the one quality that he has to bring with him and cannot be expected to acquire later on. And management must demonstrate that it requires the same integrity of itself.”
222. “If there is any one “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.”
223. “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
224. “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”
225. “I’ve seen more institutions damaged by too much caution than by rashness, though I’ve seen both.”
226. “The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.” – Peter Drucker Sayings
227. Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done. — Peter Drucker
228. “One thing is almost certain: in the future, there will be not one kind of corporation but several different ones.” — Peter Drucker
229. “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. ” – Peter Drucker
230. “Autonomous managers in a federal structure cannot be content with “reports.” They must think through what top management needs to understand. And they must accept the responsibility for educating their top management.”
231. “Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values.”
232. “You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instil soldiers with trust in their officers – because, without trust, they won’t fight.” – Peter Drucker
233. “To succeed in this new world, we will have to learn, first, who we are. Few people, even highly successful people, can answer the questions, Do you know what you’re good at? Do you know what you need to learn so that you get the full benefit of your strengths? Few have even asked themselves these questions.” – Peter Drucker
234. “If there is one point on which all authorities on Japan are in agreement, it is that Japanese institutions, whether business or government agencies, make decisions by consensus. The Japanese, we are told, debate a proposed decision throughout the organization until there is agreement on it. And only then do they make the decision.”
235. “Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity.”
236. “problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.”
237. “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.” – Peter Drucker
238. “The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission.”
239. “Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person—hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre—into an outstanding performer.”
240. “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.”
241. “Mission defines strategy, and strategy defines structure.”
242. “No other area offers richer opportunities for successful innovation than the unexpected success. In no other area are innovative opportunities less risky and their pursuit less arduous. Yet the unexpected success is almost totally neglected; worse, managements tend actively to reject it.”
243. “It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.”
244. “A time of turbulence is a dangerous time, but its greatest danger is a temptation to deny reality.”
245. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t change it.”
246. “Protectionism could indeed make the world economy poor and impede its functioning to the point of near-collapse. But it cannot destroy the common demands. It cannot undo the worldwide horizon and vision. The fundamental change has happened irrevocably. The question is not whether it will remain. The question is whether it can be turned to advantage—for society, for the individual, and for the business enterprise.”
247. “The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.” Peter Drucker
248. “The people who get nothing done often work a great deal harder. In the first place, they underestimate the time for any one task. They always expect that everything will go right. Yet, as every executive knows, nothing ever goes right. The unexpected always happens—the unexpected is indeed the only thing one can confidently expect.”
249. “Our job in life is to make a positive difference, not prove we’re right.” Peter Drucker
250. “The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.” – Peter Drucker
251. “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.”
252. “Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant.”
253. “Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.”
254. “Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.”
255. “Effective executives know where their time goes.”
256. “Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.”
257. “Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.”
258. “The worst kind of replacement planning is the search for a “crown prince.” A crown prince either has a legal right to succeed; or else nomination is likely to destroy him. No matter how carefully concealed, picking a crown prince is an overt act which the whole organization very rapidly perceives. And then all the other possible contenders unite against the crown prince and work to bring him down—and they usually succeed.”
259. “Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen.” – Peter Drucker Quotes on Goal Setting
260. “There are two types of people in the business community: those who produce results and those who give you reasons why they didn’t.” – Peter Drucker
261. “Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.” Peter Drucker
262. “Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions”
263. “Education gives you neither experience nor wisdom.” – Peter Drucker
264. “The question is: how to be useful!” A great teacher can change your life in thirty seconds.”
265. “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”
266. “As the influential management thinker Peter Drucker taught, the best—perhaps even the only—way to predict the future is to create it.10”
267. “The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.”
268. “But,’ the chairman continued, ‘in this kind of store, it is normal and healthy for fashion to produce seventy per cent of sales. Appliance sales have grown so fast that they now account for three-fifths. And that’s abnormal. We’ve tried everything we know to make fashion grow to restore the normal ratio, but nothing works. The only thing left now is to push appliance sales down to where they should be.”
269. “The only skill that will be important in the 21st century is the skill of learning new skills. Everything else will become obsolete over time.” Peter Drucker
270. “Education can no longer be confined to the schools. Every employing institution has to become a teacher.” – The New Realities, 1989
271. “A company that is not able to attract, motivate, and hold men of talent and competence will not survive. Increasingly, this will mean attracting, motivating, and holding the knowledge worker. Unlike the manual worker of yesterday, the knowledge worker does not, however, look just for a job. He looks for a career. He looks for an opportunity.”
272. “History has been written not by the most talented but by the most motivated.” – Peter Drucker
273. “tonsils or half the appendix risks as much infection or shock as if he did the whole job. And he has not cured the condition, has indeed made it worse. He either operates or he doesn’t. Similarly, the effective decision-maker either acts or he doesn’t act. He does not take half-action. This is the one thing that is always wrong, and the one sure way not to satisfy the minimum specifications, the minimum boundary conditions.”
274. “The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.”
275. “It’s amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed.” – Peter Drucker
276. “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.” — Peter Drucker
277. “Make meetings productive”
278. “Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations… They now need more and more expensive clerks, even though they call them ‘operators’ or ‘programmers.” — Peter Drucker
279. “Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.” Peter Drucker
280. “A well-managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory that is “dramatic,” a factory in which the “epic of industry” is unfolded before the visitor’s eyes, is poorly managed. A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.”
281. “If leaders are unable to slough off yesterday, to abandon yesterday, they simply will not be able to create tomorrow.”
282. “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say “I”. They don’t think “I.” They think “we”; they think “team.” – Peter Drucker
283. “Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.” – Peter Drucker Quotes on Decision Making
284. “Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.” — Peter Drucker
285. “When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. ”
286. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Peter Drucker
287. “The “non-profit” institution neither supplies goods or services nor controls. Its “product” is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their “product” is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.”
288. “The danger is in acting on what you believe satisfies the customer. You will inevitably make wrong assumptions. Leadership should not even try to guess at the answers; it should always go to customers in a systematic quest for those answers.”
289. “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”
290. “Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.” – Peter Drucker Quotes
291. “If you have more than five goals, you have none.” – Peter Drucker Quotes on Goal Setting
292. “One reason why it is difficult for management to accept unexpected success is that all of us tend to believe that anything that has lasted a fair amount of time must be ‘normal’ and go on ‘forever’. Anything that contradicts what we have come to consider a law of nature is then rejected as unsound, unhealthy, and obviously abnormal.”
293. “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, which enables you to get the task done.” – Peter Drucker
294. “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.”
295. "Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.” Peter Drucker
296. “The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.”
297. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker
298. “Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.” — Peter Drucker
299. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” — Peter Drucker
300. “We cannot yet develop a theory of innovation. But we already know enough to say when, where, and how one looks systematically for innovative opportunities, and how one judges the chances for their success or the risks of their failure. We know enough to develop, though still only in outline form, the practice of innovation.”
301. “Any existing organization, whether a business, a church, a labor union, or a hospital, goes down fast if it does not innovate. Conversely, any new organization, whether a business, a church, a labor union, or a hospital, collapses if it does not manage. Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures.”
302. “Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person – hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre – into an outstanding performer.” Peter Drucker
303. “Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.”
304. “Abandon what is about to be obsolete, develop a system to exploit your successes, and develop a systematic approach to innovation.”
305. “Write an Action Plan”
306. “The first two practices gave them the knowledge they needed. The next four helped them convert this knowledge into effective action. The last two ensured that the whole organization felt responsible and accountable.”
307. “So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.” — Peter Drucker
308. “A central economic problem of developed societies during the next twenty or thirty years is surely going to be capital formation; only in Japan is it still adequate for the economy’s needs. We therefore can ill afford to have activities conducted as ‘non-profit’, that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.”
309. “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.”
310. “Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.” – Peter Drucker
311. “Never ask who’s right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.” – Peter Drucker
312. “These apparently low-level decisions are extremely important in a knowledge-based organization.”
313. “Knowledge workers who do not ask themselves, “What can I contribute?” are not only likely to aim too low, they are likely to aim at the wrong things. Above all, they may define their contribution too narrowly.”
314. “Peter Drucker once observed that the drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.”
315. “What gets measured gets improved.” – Peter Drucker Best Quotes
316. “The community college was actually designed…to educate technologists who have both the needed theoretical knowledge and the manual skill. On this, I am convinced, rests both the still huge productivity advantage of the American economy and the…American ability to create, almost overnight, new and different industries.” – Management Challenges for the 21st Century, 1999
317. “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” – Peter Drucker
318. “I saw no point in being the richest man in the cemetery.”
319. “Effective executives do not race. They set an easy pace but keep going steadily.”
320. "Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work."— Peter Drucker
321. “Whether the responsibility for innovation rests with the chief executive officer, with another member of top management, or with a separate component, whether it is a full-time assignment or part of an executive’s responsibilities, it should always be set up and recognized both as a separate responsibility and as a responsibility of top management. And it should always include the systematic and purposeful search for innovative opportunities.”
322. “Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.”
323. “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it’s selling.” – Peter Drucker
324. “Use feedback analysis to identify your strengths. Then go to work on improving your strengths. Identify and eliminate bad habits that hinder the full development of your strengths. Figure out what you should do and do it. Finally, decide what you should not do.”
325. “People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.”
326. “The less an organization has to do to produce results, the better it does its job.”
327. “A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.”
328. “Entrepreneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield. Of”
329. “Even today few businessmen understand that research, to be productive, has to be the “disorganizer,” the creator of a different future and the enemy of today. In most industrial laboratories, “defensive research” aimed at perpetuating today, predominates.”
330. “Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform and not to please their superiors.”
331. “Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.”
332. “Unless we determine what shall be measured and what the yardstick of measurement in an area will be, the area itself will not be seen.”
333. “Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.” – Peter Drucker
334. “plan, organize, integrate, motivate, and measure.”
335. “For every organization needs performance in three major areas: It needs direct results; building of values and their reaffirmation; and building and developing people for tomorrow.”
336. “He knows that the test of organization is not genius. It is its capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance.”
337. “Leadership is an achievement of trust.” Peter Drucker
338. “Leadership is an achievement of trust.”
339. Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.” – Peter Drucker
340. “Replace your pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution.” – Peter Drucker
341. “Management by objectives works if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.”
342. “If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.”
343. “bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.”
344. “Thus the unexpected success is not just an opportunity for innovation; it demands innovation. It forces us to ask, What basic changes are now appropriate for this organization in the way it defines its business? Its technology? Its markets? If these questions are faced up to, then the unexpected success is likely to open up the most rewarding and least risky of all innovative opportunities.”
345. “Follow these five decision steps when hiring someone: Understand the job, consider three to five people, study candidates performance records to find their strengths, talk to the candidates’ colleagues about them, and once hired, explain the assignment to the new employee.”
346. “There are several kinds of incongruity: – An incongruity between the economic realities of an industry (or of a public-service area); – An incongruity between the reality of an industry (or of a public-service area) and the assumptions about it; – An incongruity between the efforts of an industry (or a public-service area) and the values and expectations of its customers; – An internal incongruity within the rhythm or the logic of a process.”
347. “Knowledge may be neutral, but what we do with it is by no means neutral.” – The Age of Discontinuity, 1969
348. “Above all, we know that an entrepreneurial strategy has more chance of success the more it starts out with the users – their utilities, their values, their realities. An innovation is a change in market or society. It produces a greater yield for the user, greater wealth-producing capacity for society, higher value or greater satisfaction. The test of an innovation is always what it does for the user. Hence, entrepreneurship always needs to be market-focused, indeed, market-driven.”
349. “In what areas would poor performance threaten to damage economic performance, greatly or at least significantly.”
350. “el efectivo hombre de decisiones actúa o no actúa. Nunca obra a medias. Actuar a medias equivale, siempre, a equivocarse y es la manera más segura de no satisfacer las especificaciones mínimas,”
351. “It might be asked, are all these policies and practices necessary? Don’t they interfere with the entrepreneurial spirit and stifle creativity? And cannot a business be entrepreneurial without such policies and practices? The answer is, perhaps, but neither very successfully nor for very long.”
352. “The only skill that will be important in the 21st century is the skill of learning new skills. Everything else will become obsolete over time.” – Peter Drucker
353. “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.” Everyone around the table nodded assent. “Then,” continued Mr. Sloan, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”
354. “It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”
355. “We know very little about self-development. But we do know one thing: People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant stature--without any more effort than is expended by the non-achievers.”
356. “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. ” —Peter Drucker, author of Managing for the Future
357. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Peter Drucker
358. “Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.”
359. “Staffing the opportunities instead of the problems not only creates the most effective organization, it also creates enthusiasm and dedication.”
360. “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” – Peter Drucker
361. “Listening (the first competence of leadership) is not a skill, it is a discipline. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.” Peter Drucker
362. “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.”
363. “And it is change that always provides the opportunity for the new and different. Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation.”
364. “This failure to ask reflects human stupidity less than it reflects human history.”
365. “Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.”
366. “It is always futile to restore normality; “normality” is only the reality of yesterday. The job is not to impose
367. “The most effective road to self-renewal is to look for the unexpected success and run with it.” – Managing the Non-Profit Organization, 1990
368. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”
369. “The acquisition of knowledge has a cost, as has the acquisition of anything. But the acquisition of knowledge has no price.” – “The Age of Social Transformation,” The Atlantic, November 1994
370. “It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.” – Peter Drucker
371. “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”
372. “Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.” – Peter Drucker
373. “Entrepreneurial management in the new venture has four requirements: It requires, first, a focus on the market. It requires, second, financial foresight, and especially planning for cash flow and capital needs ahead. It requires, third, building a top management team long before the new venture actually needs one and long before it can actually afford one. And finally, it requires of the founding entrepreneur a decision in respect to his or her own role, area of work, and relationships.”
374. “What gets measured, gets managed.”
375. “Effectiveness, in other words, is a habit; that is, a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned.”
376. “The first thing to do to attain tomorrow is to slough off yesterday.” – Management: Revised Edition, 2008
377. “Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.” Peter Drucker
378. “Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.” – Peter Drucker
379. “I have always been attracted to the unexpected success; in my experience, it holds the key to understanding.” – The Frontiers of Management, 1986
380. “The top man who concludes that his company needs to grow but who also then realizes that he does not want to change himself and his behavior has, in conscience, only one line of action open to him. He has to step aside. Even if he legally owns the company, he does not own the lives of other people. A company is not a child—and even with a human child, the time comes when the parent has to accept that the child has grown up and needs to be independent and on his own.”
381. “What is our mission? Who is our customer? What does the customer value? What are our results? and What is our plan?”
382. “The better a man is the more mistakes he will make for the more things he will try.” – Peter Drucker Quotes on Success
383. “Setting a posteriority is also unpleasant. Every posteriority is somebody else’s top priority. It is much easier to draw up a nice list of top priorities and then to hedge by trying to do “just a little bit” of everything else as well. This makes everybody happy. The only drawback is, of course, that nothing whatever gets done.”
384. “Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results.”
385. “others is required, it probably indicates a lack of courtesy—that is, a lack of manners.”
386. “Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.”
387. “Nothing succeeds like concentration on the right business. And if the company is not in the right business, diversification will no more make it a “growth company,” than a man with a broken hip will be restored to health, by being taken on a twenty-mile forced march with an eighty-pound pack on his shoulders.”
388. “But above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule. An organization in which everybody meets all the time is an organization in which no one gets anything done.”
389. “The danger of total propaganda is not that propaganda will be believed. The danger is that nothing will be believed and that every communication becomes suspect. In the end, no communication is being recieved anymore. Everything anyone says is considered a demand and is resisted, resented, and in effect not heard at all. The end results of total propaganda are not fanatics, but cynics - but this, of course, may be even greater and more dangerous corruption. (p. 20)”
390. “A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.” – Peter Drucker
391. “The only skill that will be important in the 21st century is the skill of learning new skills.Everythi ng else will become obsolete over time.” Peter Drucker
392. “The change in the meaning of knowledge that began two hundred fifty years ago has transformed society and economy.” – Post-Capitalist Society, 1993
393. “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two and only two functions: Marketing and Innovation. Marketing and Innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.”
394. “Bước tốn thời gian nhất trong cả một quy trình không phải là việc đưa ra quyết định mà là việc làm cho nó trở nên có hiệu quả, có tác dụng. Quyết định không được dựa vào công việc sẽ không phải là một quyết định mà chỉ là một ý định tốt đẹp mà thôi.
395. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.” – Peter Drucker
396. “It is a law of nature that two moving bodies in contact with each other create friction. This is as true for human beings as it is for inanimate objects.”
397. “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker
398. “Everyone can make the wrong decision—in fact, everyone will sometimes make a wrong decision. But no one needs to make a decision which, on its face, falls short of satisfying the boundary conditions.”
399. “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
400. “Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things.” Peter Drucker
401. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations. — Peter Drucker
402. “You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.” – Peter Drucker
403. “More important than any one new application is the new 'materials' concept itself. It marks a shift from concern with substances to concern with structures, a shift from artisan to scientist as man's artificer, a shift from chemistry to physics as the basic discipline, and a shift, above all, from the concrete experience of the workshop to abstract mathematics, a shift from starting with what nature provides to what man wants to accomplish.
404. “Good executives focus on opportunities rather than problems. Problems have to be taken care of, of course; they must not be swept under the rug. But problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.”
405. “entrepreneurship is by no means limited to the economic sphere although the term originated there. It pertains to all activities of human beings other than those one might term “existential” rather than “social.” And we now know that there is little difference between entrepreneurship whatever the sphere.”
406. “We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.” – Peter Drucker, American management consultant, educator, author
407. “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” — Peter Drucker
408. “Learn to manage your time. The secret is not to do the five million things that do not need to be done and will never be missed.” – “The Icon Speaks: An Interview with Peter Drucker,” Information Outlook, February 2002
409. “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”
410. “And productivity for the knowledge worker means the ability to get the right things done. It means effectiveness.”
411. “The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers’ needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager’s business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.”
412. “The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader’s charisma. What matters is the leader’s mission.” – Peter Drucker
413. “It is hard to realize today that “government” during the American Civil War a hundred years ago meant the merest handful of people. Lincoln’s Secretary of War had fewer than fifty civilian subordinates, most of them not “executives” and policy-makers but telegraph clerks. The entire Washington establishment of the U.S. government in Theodore Roosevelt’s time, around 1900, could be comfortably housed in any one of the government buildings along the Mall today.”
414. “2. Don’t diversify, don’t splinter, don’t try to do too many things at once. This is, of course, the corollary to the ‘do’: be focused!”
415. “Managements must look at every unexpected success with the questions: (1) What would it mean to us if we exploited it? (2) Where could it lead us? (3) What would we have to do to convert it into an opportunity? And (4) How do we go about it? This means, first, that managements need to set aside specific time in which to discuss unexpected successes; and second, that someone should always be designated to analyse an unexpected success and to think through how it could be exploited.”
416. “Performing organisations enjoy what they’re doing.”
417. “The time dimension is inherent in management because management is concerned with decisions for action. And action is always aimed at results in the future.” – The Practice of Management, 1954
418. “How can I achieve?” but “What can I contribute?”
419. “Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.”
420. “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” Peter Drucker
421. “An organization is not, like an animal, an end in itself, and successful by the mere act of perpetuating the species. An organization is an organ of society and fulfills itself by the contribution it makes to the outside environment.”
422. “He was, in the end, the highest level of what a teacher can be: a role model of the very ideas he taught, a walking testament to his teachings in the tremendous lasting effect of his own life.”
423. “The real achiever do one thing at a time.”
424. “A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.”
425. “Managers are action-focused; they are not philosophers and should not be.” – Peter Drucker
426. “What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or a service does for the customer.” – Peter Drucker
427. “Many brilliant people believe that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.”
428. “An organization, a social artifact, is very different from a biological organism. Yet it stands under the law that governs the structure and size of animals and plants: The surface goes up with the square of the radius, but the mass grows with the cube. The larger the animal becomes, the more resources have to be devoted to the mass and to the internal tasks, to circulation and information, to the nervous system, and so on.”
429. “Success? Odd as it seems, you will achieve the greatest results in business and career if you drop the word ‘achievement’ from your vocabulary and replace it with ‘contribution’.” – Peter Drucker
430. “Decisions are made by men. Men are fallible; at their best their works do not last long. Even the best decision has a high probability of being wrong. Even the most effective one eventually becomes obsolete.”
431. “Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.”
432. “There are a number of tasks which are top-management tasks, not because top management is the “top”—that is, because it has the legal authority or the power—but because they are tasks that can be discharged only by people who are capable of seeing the whole business and of making decisions with respect to the whole business.”
433. “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.”
434. “Manners are the lubricating oil of an organization. It is a law of nature that two moving bodies in contact with each other create friction. This is as true for human beings as it is for inanimate objects.” — Peter Drucker
435. “Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.”
436. “But the order in which these sources will be discussed is not arbitrary. They are listed in descending order of reliability and predictability. For, contrary to almost universal belief, new knowledge – and especially new scientific knowledge – is not the most reliable or most predictable source of successful innovations. For all the visibility, glamour, and importance of science-based innovation, it is actually the least reliable and least predictable one.”
437. “Will it ‘produce economic results?'”
438. “To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent.” – Peter Drucker
439. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”
440. “To make a living is no longer enough. Work also has to make a life.” – Peter Drucker
441. “Most of what you hear about entrepreneurship is all wrong. It’s not magic; it’s not mysterious, and it has nothing to do with genes. It’s a discipline and, like any discipline, it can be learned.” – Peter Drucker
442. “The one man to distrust, however, is the man who never makes a mistake, never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do. He is either a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.”
443. “Introverts do better alone with competition, extraverts do better in large group without competition”
444. “Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is no enterprise; there is only a mob. The enterprise must have simple, clear, and unifying objectives. The mission of the organization has to be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision. The goals that embody it have to be clear, public, and constantly reaffirmed. Management’s first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives, values, and goals. Management”
445. “What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?”
446. “Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.” – Peter Drucker
447. “Business, that’s easily defined – it’s other people’s money.” — Peter Drucker
448. “Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not "making friends and influencing people", that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”
449. “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the
450. “Time is the scarcest resource of the manager; If it is not managed, nothing else can be managed.” – Peter Drucker
451. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” ~ Peter Drucker
452. “Knowledge workers own the means of production. It is the knowledge between their ears. And it is a totally portable and enormous capital asset.” – Management Challenges for the 21st Century, 1999
453. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations. —Peter Drucker
454. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.—Peter Drucker
455. “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” – Peter Drucker
456. “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.” — Peter Drucker
457. “The truly important events on the outside are not the trends. They are changes in the trends. These determine ultimately success or failure of an organization and its efforts. Such changes, however, have to be perceived; they cannot be counted, defined, or classified. The classifications still produce the expected figures—as they did for the Edsel. But the figures no longer correspond to actual behavior.”
458. “Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes.” — Peter Drucker
459. “Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.”
460. “Leadership is the lifting of a man’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a man’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a man’s personality beyond its normal limitations.”
461. “Innovations had better be capable of being started small, requiring at first little money, few people, and only a small and limited market. Otherwise, there is not enough time to make the adjustments and changes that are almost always needed for an innovation to succeed. Initially innovations rarely are more than ‘almost right’. The necessary changes can be made only if the scale is small and the requirements for people and money fairly modest.”
462. “The man who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase, “top management.” He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.”
463. “Knowledge has to be improved, challenged and increased constantly, or it vanishes.”
464. “Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.” – Peter Drucker
465. “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” – Peter Drucker
466. “The critical question is not “How can I achieve?” but “What can I contribute?””
467. “Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes but no plans.” – Peter Drucker
468. “People learn the most when teaching others.”
469. “Two hundred people, of course, can do a great deal more work than one man. But it does not follow that they produce and contribute more.”
470. “Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself – not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.” Peter Drucker
471. “Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.” – Peter Drucker
472. “In human affairs, the distance between the leaders and the average is a constant.”
473. “Only a clear, focused, and common mission can hold the organization together and enable it to produce results.”
474. “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” Peter Drucker
475. “You should not change yourself, but create yourself, that mean build around your strengths and removing bad habits”
476. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. “
477. “Effective executives build on strengths”
478. “Its five business principles are “respect for humans,” “customer satisfaction,” “social responsibility,” “value creation,” and “innovation orientation.”
479. “What is demanded of the top man is indeed a great deal. He has to accept that he no longer can be the virtuoso performer. Instead he has to become the “conductor.”
480. “History has been written not by the most talented but by the most motivated.”
481. “If we decide that we have to abolish or curtail economic freedom as potentially demon-provoking, the danger is very great that we shall soon feel all freedom threatens to release the demonic forces.”
482. “The ultimate resource in economic development is people. It is people, not capital or raw materials that develop an economy.”
483. “Toshiba and Hitachi made better sets at the time, only they showed them on the Ginza in Tokyo and in the big-city department stores, making it pretty clear that farmers were not particularly welcome in such elegant surroundings. Matsushita went to the farmers and sold its televisions door-to-door, something no one in Japan had ever done before for anything more expensive than cotton pants or aprons.”
484. “Develop your people. Focus on their strengths. Then make high demands based on a person’s strengths. Finally, periodically view their performance.”
485. “If it were a decision today to start something you are already in (to enter a business, to hire a person, to institute a policy, to launch a project, etc.), would you? If not, then why do you persist?”
486. “In what area would excellence really have an extraordinary impact on the economic results of our business, to the point where it might transform the economic performance of the entire business?
487. “Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates a resource. There is no such thing as a ‘resource’ until man finds a use for something in nature and thus endows it with economic value. Until then, every plant is a weed and every mineral just another rock.”
488. “Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.”
489. “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.”
490. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.” Peter Drucker
491. “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”
492. “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.” – Peter Drucker , Consultant
493. “The critical question is not “How can I achieve?” but “What can I contribute?” – Peter Drucker
494. “a knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization. It is meant for every one of the men I call “executives.”
495. “The most effective way to manage change is to create it.” – Peter Drucker Quotes on Change
496. “As a manager you’re paid to be uncomfortable. If you’re comfortable, it’s a sure sign you’re doing things wrong.” Peter Drucker
497. “All military services have long ago learned that the officer who has given an order goes out and sees for himself whether it has been carried out. At the least he sends one of his own aides—he never relies on what he is told by the subordinate to whom the order was given. Not that he distrusts the subordinate; he has learned from experience to distrust communications.”
498. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” –
499. “An incongruity is a discrepancy, a dissonance, between what is and what ‘ought’ to be, or between what is and what everybody assumes it to be.”
500. “Ideas are like frog eggs: you’ve got to lay a thousand to hatch one.” – Peter Drucker
501. Strategic management is not a box of tricks or a bundle of techniques. It is analytical thinking and commitment of resources to action. But quantification alone is not planning. Some of the most important issues in strategic management cannot be quantified at all.' – Peter Drucker
502. “An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance, and nothing else. Any attempt by an employer to go beyond this is usurpation. It is an immoral as well as illegal intrusion of privacy.”
503. “Do not measure your life by your goals but what you are doing to achieve them.” – Peter Drucker
504. “Only productivity of the knowledge worker can make it possible for developed countries to maintain their high standard of living against the competition of low-wage, developing economies. So”
505. “Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.” — Peter Drucker
506. Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art. – Peter Drucker
507. “Those who perform love what they’re doing. I’m not saying they like everything they do…..Pianists have a wonderful expression I heard many years ago: “I practice until I have my life in my fingers.”
508. “Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes.” – Peter Drucker Quotes on Leadership
509. “Change is opportunity.” – The Frontiers of Management, 1986
510. “It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence”
511. “And you seem to spend a lot of energy on the question of how to be successful. But that is the wrong question.” He paused, then like the Zen master thwacking the table with a bamboo stick: “The question is: how to be useful!” A great teacher can change your life in thirty seconds.”
512. “Success always obsoletes the very behaviour that achieved it.” – Peter Drucker
513. “Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.”
514. “If you can’t measure it you can’t improve it.”
515. “3. And finally, innovation is an effect in economy and society, a change in the behaviour of customers, of teachers, of farmers, of eye surgeons – of people in general. Or it is a change in a process – that is, in how people work and produce something. Innovation therefore always has to be close to the market, focused on the market, indeed market-driven.”
516. “Know your strengths. Apply them to areas in your organisation where you can make a contribution. Make sure your values and the values of the organisation are compatible.”
517. “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.” – Peter Drucker
518. “We may not understand the reason for it; indeed, we often cannot figure it out. Still, an incongruity is a symptom of an opportunity to innovate.”
519. “If you want to diagram my work, in the center is writing, then comes consulting, then comes teaching. I’ve never been primarily an academic. I like to teach because that’s the way I learn.” – “Scandals Nothing New to Business Guru,” Bruce Rosenstein, USA TODAY, July 5, 2002
520. “The first – and usually the best – opportunity for successful change is to exploit one’s own successes and build on them. Problems cannot be ignored. And serious problems have to be taken care of. But to be change leaders, enterprises have to focus on opportunities. They have to starve problems and feed opportunities.”
521. “Gerenciar é fazer as coisas do jeito certo; liderar é fazer as coisas certas.”
522. “Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained.”
523. “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
524. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
525. “Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.” — Peter Drucker
526. “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
527. “Any organisation develops people: it has no choice. It either helps them grow or stunts them.”
528. “If you haven’t learned how to learn, you’ll have a hard time. Knowing how to learn is partly curiosity. But it’s also a discipline.” – “Peter’s Principles,” Harriet Rubin, Inc., March 1998
529. “To get at the new and better, you have to throw out the old, outworn, obsolete, no longer productive, as well as the mistakes, failure and misdirections of effort of the past.” – Managing For the Future, 1993
530. “Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.”
531. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” ― Peter Drucker
532. “The job is, however, not to set priorities. That is easy. Everybody can do it. The reason why so few executives concentrate is the difficulty of setting “posteriorities”—that is, deciding what tasks not to tackle—and of sticking to the decision.”
533. “When a change in perception takes place, the facts do not change. Their meaning does.”
534. “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.” —Peter Drucker, author of Managing for the Future