Peter F Drucker Quotes

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.

What's measured improves

Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.

There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

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

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

Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.

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

The companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under.

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

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

This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship - the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.

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

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old

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

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.

Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.

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

Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society - and especially in the economy - as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. That is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur. It was intended as a manifesto and as a declaration of dissent: the entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes. As Joseph Schumpeter formulated it, his task is "creative destruction.

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

The best way to predict your future is to create it

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

The people who work within these industries or public services know that there are basic flaws. But they are almost forced to ignore them and to concentrate instead on patching here, improving there, fighting the fire or caulking that crack. They are thus unable to take the innovation seriously, let alone to try to compete with it. They do not, as a rule, even notice it until it has grown so big as to encroach on their industry or service, by which time it has become irreversible. In the meantime, the innovators have the field to themselves.

Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.

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.

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

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

Only a clear, focused, and common mission can hold the organization together and enable it to produce results.

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

People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.

No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.

And it is change that always provides the opportunity for the new and different. Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation.