Quotes by Peter Drucker

Teamwork is neither good nor desirable.It is a fact. Wherever people work together or play together they do so as a team. Which team to use for what purpose is a crucial, difficult and risky decision that is even harder to unmake. Managements have yet to learn how to make it.

In every success story, you will find someone who has made a courageous decision.

Replace your pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution.

Concentration is the key to results. No other principles of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration.

Concentration is the key to economic results. No other principles of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration.

There is only one ethics, one set of rules of morality, one code: That of individual behavior in which the same rules apply to everyone alike.

The real achiever does one thing at a time.

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes.

There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

Executives of necessity live and work within an organization. Unless they make conscious efforts to perceive the outside, the inside may blind them to the true reality.

Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity.

People learn the most when teaching others.

Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.

The real achiever do one thing at a time.

Great wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.

Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.

Managing innovation will increasingly become a challenge to management, and especially to top management, and a touchstone of its competence.

There are only two things in a business that make money -- innovation and marketing, everything else is cost.

Making changes to better appeal to customer is INNOVATION.

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.

It's more important to do the right thing than to do things right.

A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.

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.

Long range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.

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.

Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.

Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.

There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all. Peter F.

Leaders shouldn't attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can't compromise. Peter F.

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.

To be more requires a man who is conceited enough to believe that the world really needs him and depends on his getting into power. Peter F.

The test of organization is not genius. It is its capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance. Peter F.

Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.

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 F.

To make the future is highly risky. It is less risky, however, than not to try to make it. Peter F.

In every success story, you will find someone who has made a courageous decision. Peter F.

Nobody can predict the future; the idea is to have a firm grasp of the present. Peter F.

There are no creeds in mathematics. Peter F.

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old. Peter F.

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. Peter F.

The one person to distrust is the one who never makes a mistake. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.

Replace your pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution.

There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.

People who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs.

The enterprise, by definition, must be capable of producing more or better than all the resources that comprise it.

A business enterprise must continue beyond the lifetime of the individual or of the generation to be capable of producing its contributions to economy and to society.

Business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

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

The essence of management is to make knowledge productive.

Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven't.

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hope... But no plans.

Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change.

Business, that's easily defined -- it's other people's money.

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

There are no creeds in mathematics.

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.

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 have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.

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.

Thus, for those who are willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovation opportunity.

If analysis shows that someone's brilliant work fails again and again as soon as cooperation from others is required, it probably indicates a lack of courtesy -- that is, a lack of manners.

Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.

In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.

Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.

People are effective because they say no.

An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.

It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.

The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system's weaknesses irrelevant.

There's no such thing as knowledge management;

there are only knowledgeable people.

Information only becomes knowledge

in the hands of someone

who knows what to do with it.

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.

One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.

Information is the manager's main tool, indeed the manager's capital, and it is he who must decide what information he needs and how to use it.

Morale in an organization does not mean that people get along together; the test is performance not conformance.

The new always looks so puny-so unpromising-next to the reality of the massive, ongoing business.

Any organisation develops people; it either forms them or deforms them.

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.

As a manager you're paid to be uncomfortable. If you're comfortable, it's a sure sign you're doing things wrong.

Don't solve problems. Pursue opportunities.

Knowledge applied is productivity.

Never underrate the boss! The boss may look illiterate. He may look stupid. But there is no risk at all in overrating a boss. If you underrate him he will bitterly resent it or impute to you the deficiency in brains and knowledge you imputed to him.

The one to distrust is the person who never makes a mistake, never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried and the trivial.

Production is not the application of tools to materials, but logic to work.

To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.

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.

The monomaniac is unlikely to succeed. Most leave only their bleached bones in the roadless desert. But the rest of us, with our multiple interests instead of a single mission, are certain to fail and have no impact at all.

Miracles are great, but they're so damn unpredictable.

You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.

It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.

The healthier a new venture and the faster it grows, the more financial feeding it requires.

The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society -- its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions -- rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

During periods of discontinuous, abrupt change, the essence of adaptation involves a keen sensitivity to what should be abandoned -- not what should be changed or introduced. A willingness to depart from the familiar has distinct survival value.

Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.

There is no perfect strategic decision. One always has to pay a price. One always has to balance conflicting objectives, conflicting opinions, and conflicting priorities. The best strategic decision is only an approximation -- and a risk.

No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility.

If something fails despite being carefully planned, carefully designed, and conscientiously executed, that failure often bespeaks underlying change and, with it, opportunity.