Peter Drucker Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Peter Drucker Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
Decision making is the specific executive task.
In todays economy, the most important resource is no longer labor, capital or land; it is knowledge
Tomorrow everybody - or practically everybody - will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.
By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.
Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.
If you want to predict the future create it.
One can either work or meet. One cannot do both at the same time.
Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.
Quality of character doesn't make a leader, but the lack of it flaws the entire process.
There are usually half a dozen right answers to what needs to be
done. Yet, unless a person makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing.
Far too much reorganization goes on all the time. Organizitis is like a spastic colon.
Production is not the application of tools to materials, but logic to work.
Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything.
Working with people is difficult, but not impossible.
A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.
Innovation opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.
Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable.
In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers , is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power.
If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total
depression.
Knowledge is information that changes something
or somebody - either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an
individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action.
That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society post-capitalist.
Management has authority only as long as it performs.
Here is need for a person to be generally educated. Otherwise you shrivel up much too soon. Whether this means reading the bible (I read the New Testament every few years) or reading the great 19th century novelists (the greatest and shrewdest judge of people and of society who ever lived), or classical philosophy (which I cannot read-it puts me to sleep immediately), or history (which is secondary). What matters is that the knowledge worker, by the time he or she reaches middle age, has developed and nourished a human being rather than a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer.
If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.
Financial " synergy " is a will-o'-the-wisp.It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice.
Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.
One reason for the tremendous increase in health-care costs in the U.S. is managerial neglect of the "hotel services" by the people who dominate the hospital, such as doctors and nurses.
Marketing and innovation make money. Everything else is a cost.
The paradox of the prophet: his very success is his failure. The prophet whose time has come no longer shocks; he entertains.
If you can't measure it, you can't change it.
Any time I have seen someone accomplishing something magnificent, they have been a monomaniac with a mission. A single-minded individual with a passion.
One either meets or one works.
Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.
Look upon every obstacle as part payment towards your success.
Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time.
What gets measured gets managed.
Don't take on things you don't believe in and that you yourself are not good at. Learn to say no. Effective leaders match the objective needs of their company with the subjective competencies. As a result, they get an enormous amount of things done fast.
I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information.
Replace your pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution.
Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got.
In the managerial organization, the top people sit in judgment; in the innovative organization it is their job to encourage ideas, no matter how unripe or crude.
Schools will change more in the next 30 years than they have since the invention of the printed book.
Knowledge is power. In post-capitalism, power comes from transmitting information to make it productive, not hiding it.
Profit is not a cause but a result-
Every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise
Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.
The greatest change in corporate culture - and the way business is being conducted - may be the accelerated growth of relationships based ... on partnership.
In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise.
Management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.
It is willingness of people to give of themselves over and above the demands of the job that distinguishes the great from the merely adequate.
We always remember best the irrelevant.
The critical question is not "How can I achieve?" but "What can I contribute?"
Work is an extension of personality. It is achievement. It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself, measures his worth, and his humanity.
People who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs.
Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not bounced.
An institution which is financed by a budget - or which enjoys a monopoly which the customer cannot escape - is rewarded for what it deserves rather than what it earns. It is paid for 'good intentions' and 'programs'. It is paid for not alienating important constituents rather than satisfying any one group. It is misdirected by the way it is being paid into defining performance and results as what will produce the budget rather than as what will produce contribution.
One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work.
Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.
No business can do everything. Even if it has the money, it will never have enough good people. It has to set priorities. The worst thing to do is a little bit of everything. This makes sure that nothing is being accomplished. It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.
The success and ultimately the survival of every business, large or small, depends in the last analysis on its ability to develop people. This ability is not measured by any of our conventional yardsticks of economic success; yet, is the final measurement.
The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside.The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a satisfied patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise there are only costs.
It has been said, and only half in jest, that a tough, professionally led union is a great force for improving management performance. It forces the manager to think about what he is doing and to be able to explain his actions and behavior.
The only real difference between one organization and another is the performance of its people.
Yet there is nothing more dangerous than to be premature in exploiting a change in perception.
Business, that's easily defined - it's other people's money.
In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.
The dilemma of modern society: the conflict between the need for capital formation at a high rate and the popular condemnation of interest and dividends as "unearned income" and "capitalist," if not as sinful and wicked.
(Waste = Loss): The first rule of business is to survive and the guiding principle of business economics is not the maximisation of profit, it is the avoidance of loss
Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise.
Once the facts are clear the decisions jump out at you.
The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves ...
You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.
The company is not and must never claim to be home, family, religion, life or fate for the individual. It must never interfere in his private life or his citizenship. He is tied to the company through a voluntary and cancellable employment contract, not through some mystical or indissoluble bond.
Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management.
All companies are service companies; some also manufacture products.
Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are a means to mobilize resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.
And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.
Mother Teresa's numerical results were not her greatest contribution. Instead, she made the world-and especially India-conscious of compassion.
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.
Morale in an organization does not mean that "people get along together"; the test is performance not conformance.
We 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.
Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change
A business is not defined by its name, statutes, or articles of incorporation. It is defined by the business mission. Only a clear definition of the mission and purpose of the organization makes possible clear and realistic business objectives.
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese.
Ideas are like frog eggs: you've got to lay a thousand to hatch one.
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.
Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business - in demographics, in values, in technology or science - and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.
Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work - on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself - it must be organized for constant change.
You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths.
Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.
Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.
The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.
In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time - literally - substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.
The true business of every company is to make and keep customers.
Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are manual labor.
It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, The enterprise must demand it of him.
Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.
Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.
Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.
