Peter Drucker Quotes (98 Quotes)

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.

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got.

The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.

The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.

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.'

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.

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

The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

A business exists to create a customer.

Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.

Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.

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

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.

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.

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

One cannot buy, rent or hire more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it. 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. All work takes place in, and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource.

Education can no longer be the sole property of the state.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

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.

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise.

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

As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel.

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.

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

The overseer of the unskilled peasants who dragged stone for the pyramids did not concern himself with morale or motivation,

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

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.

The growth for education and training will be in continuing adult education. Online delivery is the trigger for this growth, but the demand for lifetime education stems from profound changes in society. We live in an economy where knowledge, not buildings and machinery, is the chief resource and where knowledge-workers make up the biggest part of the work force.

Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.

We always remember best the irrelevant.

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.

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.

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

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two - and only two - basic functions marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results all the rest are costs.

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

The job of a professional manager is not to like people. It is not to change people. It is to put their strengths to work.

To improve communications, work not on the utterer, but the recipient.

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

If a manager spends more than 10 percent of his time on human relations the group is probably too large.

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

Knowledge workers are neither farmers nor labor nor business they are employees of organizations.