Peter Drucker Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Peter Drucker. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
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Peter F. Drucker (Essential Drucker)
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The best way to predict your future is to create it
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Peter F. Drucker
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If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old
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Peter F. Drucker
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The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.
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Peter F. Drucker
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No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.
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Peter F. Drucker
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There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.
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Peter F. Drucker
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The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
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Peter F. Drucker
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What's measured improves
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Peter F. Drucker
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Business has only two functions β€” marketing and innovation.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
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Peter F. Drucker
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.
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Peter F. Drucker
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker
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This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship - the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
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Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
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There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
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Peter F. Drucker
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The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.
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Peter F. Drucker
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
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Peter F. Drucker
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker (Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices)
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Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
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Peter F. Drucker
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So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.
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Peter F. Drucker
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices)
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When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Essential Drucker)
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It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem - which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials))
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing Oneself (Harvard Business Review Classics))
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Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.
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Peter F. Drucker
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A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.
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Peter F. Drucker
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There is the risk you cannot afford to take, [and] there is the risk you cannot afford not to take. PETER DRUCKER
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
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Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform and not to please their superiors.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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If there is any one β€œsecret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker
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There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.
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Peter F. Drucker
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The best way to predict your future is to create it.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Entrepreneurship is "risky" mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.
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Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
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There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.
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Peter F. Drucker
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The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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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
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Peter F. Drucker (The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization: An Inspiring Tool for Organizations and the People Who Lead Them (Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum Book 90))
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Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing Oneself (Harvard Business Review Classics))
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Peter Drucker, who said, β€œOur mission in life should be to make a positive difference, not to prove how smart or right we are.
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Marshall Goldsmith (Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last)
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Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
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Peter F. Drucker
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing Oneself (Harvard Business Review Classics))
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The computer is a moron.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Every enterprise is a learning and teaching institution. Training and development must be built into it on all levelsβ€”training and development that never stop.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Essential Drucker)
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Effectiveness must be learned.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
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Peter F. Drucker
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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 exactly what people cannot do, but never sees anything they can do, will undermine the spirit of his organization.
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Peter F. Drucker (Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices)
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plan, organize, integrate, motivate, and measure.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
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Peter F. Drucker
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It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing Oneself (Harvard Business Review Classics))
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Managing yourself requires taking responsibility for relationships.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing Oneself (Harvard Business Review Classics))
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The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.
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Peter F. Drucker
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You should not change yourself, but create yourself, that mean build around your strengths and removing bad habits
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing Oneself (Harvard Business Review Classics))
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The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic requirements of effective human relations: communications; teamwork; self-development; and development of others.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
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History has been written not by the most talented but by the most motivated.
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Peter F. Drucker
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A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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One cannot hire a handβ€”the whole man always comes with it,
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Converting a decision into action requires answering several distinct questions: Who has to know of this decision? What action has to be taken? Who is to take it? And what does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it? The first and the last of these are too often overlookedβ€”with dire results.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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The less an organization has to do to produce results, the better it does its job.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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There is no such thing as a β€œgood man.” Good for what? is the question.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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a decision without an alternative is a desperate gambler’s throw,
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices)
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker
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By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else. Here, therefore, is the one area where weakness is a disqualification by itself rather than a limitation on performance capacity and strength.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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Is this still worth doing?” And if it isn’t, he gets rid of it so as to be able to concentrate on the few tasks that, if done with excellence, will really make a difference in the results of his own job and in the performance of his organization.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker (Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices)
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Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society - and especially in the economy - as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. That is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur. It was intended as a manifesto and as a declaration of dissent: the entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes. As Joseph Schumpeter formulated it, his task is "creative destruction.
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Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
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Of all the important pieces of self-knowledge, understanding how you learn is the easiest to acquire.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing Oneself (Harvard Business Review Classics))
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Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant.
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Peter F. Drucker (Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices)
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Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Many brilliant people believe that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.
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Peter F. Drucker
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Today is always the result of actions and decisions taken yesterday. Man, however, whatever his title or rank, cannot foresee the future. Yesterday’s actions and decisions, no matter how courageous or wise they may have been, inevitably become today’s problems,
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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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 happensβ€”the unexpected is indeed the only thing one can confidently expect.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Essential Drucker)
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Entrepreneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield. Of course, there is a risk they may not succeed. But if they are even moderately successful, the returns should be more than adequate to offset whatever risk there might be.
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Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
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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
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Peter F. Drucker (The Essential Drucker)
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The oft-repeated quip, β€œI’m sorry to write you a long letter, as I did not have time to write a short one,” could be applied to meetings: β€œI’m sorry to imprison you in this long meeting, as I did not have time to prepare a short one.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials))
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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 aidesβ€”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.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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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 β€œoperating.” 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.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
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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 statureβ€”without any more effort than is expended by the nonachievers.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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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.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done)
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The people who work within these industries or public services know that there are basic flaws. But they are almost forced to ignore them and to concentrate instead on patching here, improving there, fighting the fire or caulking that crack. They are thus unable to take the innovation seriously, let alone to try to compete with it. They do not, as a rule, even notice it until it has grown so big as to encroach on their industry or service, by which time it has become irreversible. In the meantime, the innovators have the field to themselves.
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Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
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The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture. McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is β€œvalue” to the customer?), standardizing the β€œproduct,” designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship.
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Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship)