Peter Drucker quotes:

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.

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

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

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

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Never mind your happiness; do your duty.

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.

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

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

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

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

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

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

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

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.

The computer actually may have aggravated management's degenerative tendency to focus inward on costs.

Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.

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

Leadership is defined by results not attributes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

human beings need community. If there are no communities available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities... Only the social sector, that is, the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, can create what we now need, communities for citizens... What the dawning 21st century needs above all is equally explosive growth of the nonprofit social sector in building communities in the newly dominant social environment, the city.

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

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

Every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise

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

The "non-profit" institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its "product" is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their "product" is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.

Business is society's change agent.

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

Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business - in demographics, in values, in technology or science - and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.

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.'

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.

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

Trust is congruence between what you say and what you do.

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.

The greatest change in corporate culture - and the way business is being conducted - may be the accelerated growth of relationships based... on partnership.

Providing more desirable products, services, and customer experiences is vital to the continued existence of any business. And that is INNOVATION.

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.

One reason for the tremendous increase in health-care costs in the U.S. is managerial neglect of the "hotel services" by the people who dominate the hospital, such as doctors and nurses.

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

The ultimate resource in economic development is people. It is people, not capital or raw materials that develop an economy.

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

If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.

The most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question.

Strategic planning is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial (risk-taking) decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity; organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions; and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback.

What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady and continuous.

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

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.

Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior...

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

Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.

Business exists to supply goods and services to customers and economic surplus to society, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers or even dividends to shareholders.

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

Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person - hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre - into an outstanding performer.

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.

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

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 not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.

A business is not defined by its name, statutes, or articles of incorporation. It is defined by the business mission. Only a clear definition of the mission and purpose of the organization makes possible clear and realistic business objectives.

That people even in well paid jobs choose ever earlier retirement is a severe indictment of our organizations -- not just business , but government service, the universities. These people don't find their jobs interesting.

Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.

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.

By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.

The largest 100 corporations hold 25 percent of the worldwide productive assets, which in turn control 75 percent of international trade and 98 percent of all foreign direct investment.The multinational corporation...puts the economic decision beyond the effective reach of the political process and its decision-makers, national governments.

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.

Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. SO for more than 60 years I have kept studying one subject at a time.

Businesses once grew by one of two ways; grass roots up, or by acquisition... Today businesses grow through alliances - all kinds of dangerous alliances. Joint ventures and customer partnerings which, by the way, very few people understand.

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

Knowledge is power. In post-capitalism, power comes from transmitting information to make it productive, not hiding it.

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.

No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.

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

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

Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills - accounting and what have you - but you can't teach them management.

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

You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers - because without trust, they won't fight.

The computer is a moron.

The basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge.

We can ill afford to have activities conducted as "non-profit," that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.

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

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

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

There is the general belief that the corporation income tax is a tax on the "rich" and on the "fat cats." But with pension funds owning 30% of American large business-and soon to own 50%-the corporation income tax, in effect, eases the load on those in top income brackets and penalizes the beneficiaries of pension funds.

Ideas are cheap and abundant; what is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.

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

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.

Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.

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

The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.

Don't solve problems. Pursue opportunities.

Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.

Follow effective action with quiet reflection.

The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.

There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology , society , economy , and institutions .

When the business grows, the person who founded it is incredibly busy. Rapid growth puts an enormous strain on a business. You outgrow your production facilities. You outgrow your management capabilities.

Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but the test of their validity.