Peter Drucker Quotes (98 Quotes)


    The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

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

    Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.


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


    Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.


    Decision making is the specific executive task.

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

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

    Some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I've worked with over a sixty-five-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses.

    Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

    Business has only two basic functions-marketing and innovation.

    Time is the scarcest resource of the manager If it is not managed, nothing else can be managed.

    Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.

    Because its purpose is to create a customer, your business has two purposes and two purposes only Marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation make you money, generate sales, produce profit. Everything else is an expense...

    The Daily Drucker 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done.

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

    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.

    Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.

    INNOVATION is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation.

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

    Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise.


    The best way to predict the future is to create it.

    Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.

    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.

    My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.

    The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.

    Institutions mistake good intentions for objectives. They say health care that's an intention, not an objective.

    The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

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

    Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything.

    We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.

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

    The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

    Don't try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present.

    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.

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

    Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

    Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the "naturals," the ones who somehow know how to teach.

    When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.

    A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

    First and last, Drucker is a moralist of our business civilization.

    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.

    Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.

    In all recorded history there has not been one economist who had to worry about where his next meal was coming from.


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