Quotes by Peter Drucker
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The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago.

In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a non- world.

Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will be taken over by a Central government.

The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.

All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.

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.

Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.

Look at government programs for the past fifty years. Every single one -- except warfare -- achieved the exact opposite of its announced goal.

No matter how deeply wedded one may be to the free enterprise system (and I, for one, am wedded for life), one has to accept the need for positive government; one has to consider government action on a sizable scale as desirable rather than as a necessary evil.

A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.

Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing.

Objectives can be compared to a compass bearing by which a ship navigates. A compass bearing is firm, but in actual navigation, a ship may veer off its course for many miles. Without a compass bearing, a ship would neither find its port nor be able to estimate the time required to get there.

Any time I have seen someone accomplishing something magnificent, they have been a monomaniac with a mission. A single-minded individual with a passion.

The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it's dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it.

The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.

There are just two questions to ask to attain success in business: First, What business am I in? Second, How's business?

To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works.

The 1st question the effective decision-maker asks is: 'Is this a generic situation or an exception?'

Decision making is the specific executive task.

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.

With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe.

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.

Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up.

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.

If general perception changes from seeing the glass as 'half-full' to seeing it as 'half empty' there are major innovative opportunities.

Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.

Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.

Knowledge is being applied to knowledge itself. It is now fast becoming the one factor in production, sidelining both capital and labour.

The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is ... to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker.

The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.

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

What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

The person who will make the greatest contribution to a company is the mature person-and you cannot have maturity if you have no life or interest outside the job.

Managers are agents of transformation, converting the workforce in developed countries from one of manual workers to one of highly educated knowledge workers.

More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.

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

What's measured improves.

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.

They wrongly believe that good intentions move mountains. Bulldozers move mountains. But there are exceptions.

Conductors do not know how the oboe does its work, but they know what the oboe should contribute.

The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society.

Adversarial power relationships only work if you never have to see or work with the bastards again.

The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.

Value added is a meaningless concept for a retail business , for a bank, for a life insurance company, and for any other business which is not primarily engaged in manufacturing.

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.

There's an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.

A fundamental responsibility of leadership is make sure that everybody knows the mission, understands it, lives it.

There's nothing so useless than executing a task efficiently when it actually never should have been executed at all.

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

The basic economic resource -- the means of production -

is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor.

It is and will be knowledge.

No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.

If socialism is defined as ownership of the means of production -- and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition -- then the United States is the first truly Socialist country.

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.

If a government commission had worked on the horse, you would have the first horse that could operate its knee joint in both directions. The trouble is it couldn't have stood up.

The better a man is the more mistakes will he make -- for the more new things he will try.

Successful leaders don't start out asking, 'What do I want to do?' They ask, 'What needs to be done?' Then they ask, 'Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?'

That the government's power under the Taft-Hartley Act to stop a strike by injunction so clearly strengthens the hand of the employer-even though it is used only when a strike threatens
the national health, welfare, or safety-is a grave blemish and explains much of union resistance to the Act.

Mother Teresa's numerical results were not her greatest contribution. Instead, she made the world -- and especially India -- conscious of compassion.

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.

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.

The productivity of people requires continuous learning, as the Japanese have taught us. It requires adoption in the West of the specific Japanese Zen concept where one learns to do better what one already does well.

In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.

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.

Successful people know they need to get many things done-and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate their time and energy on doing one thing at a time-and on doing first things firs.

Management and union may be likened to that serpent of the fables who on one body had two heads that fighting each other with poisoned fangs, killed themselves.

The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today's society.

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.

Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.

Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past.

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.

What's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There's no excuse for it. No justification. No explanation. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we'll pay a very nasty price.

Too many leaders try to do a little bit of 25 things and get nothing done. They are very popular because they always say yes. But they get nothing done.

The subordinate's job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual.

What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter.

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.

For the first four years, no new enterprise produces profits. Even Mozart didn't start writing music until he was four.

Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.

All economic activity is by definition high risk. And defending yesterday -- that is, not innovating -- is far more risky than making tomorrow.

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.

Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions.

Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese.

Promotion should not be more important than accomplishment, or avoiding instability more important than taking the right risk.

Important decisions are risky. They should be controversial. Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework.

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.

The most important work of the executive is to identify the changes that have already happened. The important thing ... is to exploit the changes that have already occurred and to use them as opportunities.

Successful innovators are..not risk-focused; they are opportunity focused.