Peter F. Drucker Quotes (21 Quotes)

Management is not being brilliant. Management is being conscientious.

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

The critical factor of a problem is the element that has to be changed before anything else can be changed.

Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined.

'Management' means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

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.

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

One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.

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

What managers decide to stop doing is often more important than what they decide to do.

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 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.

No organization can depend on genius the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary human beings perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each man's strength to help all the others perform. The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.

Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is notquality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay onlyfor what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.

A business exists because the consumer is willing to pay you his money. You run a business to satisfy the consumer. That isn't marketing. That goes way beyond marketing.

If a business is to be considered a continuous process, instead of a series of disjointed stop-and-go events, then the economic universe in which a business operatesand all the major events within itmust have rhyme, rhythm, or reason.

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 high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

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

The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

The Pertinent Question is NOT how to do things right but how to find the right things to do, and to concentrate resources and efforts on them.