Quotes by Management Consultants

Imitation is for shirkers like-minded-ness for the comfort lovers unifying for the creators.
Mary Parker Follett
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.
Peter F Drucker
What's measured improves
Peter F Drucker
The insight to see possible new paths the courage to try them the judgment to measure results-these are the qualities of a leader.
Mary Parker Follett
Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.
Peter F Drucker
Coercive power is the curse of the universe coactive power the enrichment and advancement of every human soul.
Mary Parker Follett
There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.
Peter F Drucker
The unifying of opposites is the eternal process.
Mary Parker Follett
A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.
Peter F Drucker
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
Peter F Drucker
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.
Peter F Drucker
Experience may be hard but we claim its gifts because they are real even though our feet bleed on its stones.
Mary Parker Follett
That is always our problem not how to get control of people but how all together we can get control of a situation.
Mary Parker Follett
On an important decision one rarely has 100% of the information needed for a good decision no matter how much one spends or how long one waits. And, if one waits too long, he has a different problem and has to start all over. This is the terrible dilemma of the hesitant decision maker.
Robert K. Greenleaf
There are an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.
Peter F Drucker
Things have to be made to happen in a way you want them to happen. Without management without the intervention of organized willpower the desired result simply cannot be obtained.
Robert Heller
One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
Peter Drucker
Along this tree From root to crown Ideas flow up And vetoes down.
Peter Drucker
Often greater risk is involved in postponement than in making a wrong decision.
Harry A. Hopf
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.
Peter F Drucker
Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
Peter F Drucker
Where there is not community, trust, respect, ethical behavior are difficult for the young to learn and for the old to maintain.
Robert K. Greenleaf
The manager cannot share his power with division superintendent or foreman or workman but he can give them opportunities for developing their power.
Mary Parker Follett
It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because ofthe need to assuage an unusual power drive.
Robert Greenleaf
Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.
Peter F Drucker
This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship - the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
Peter F Drucker
Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it's enough.
Robert Heller
People often overestimate what they can accomplish in one year. But they greatly underestimate what they could accomplish in five years.
Peter Drucker
There is no such thing as vicarious experience.
Mary Parker Follett
Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.
Peter F Drucker
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.
Peter F Drucker
The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.
Peter F Drucker
If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old
Peter F Drucker
Imagine an organization where the physical plant honors the mission, celebrates the employees, shares information, holds people accountable, shapes the outside world's view and helps drive performance. That would be an organization which uses visual management.
Stewart Liff
Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.
Peter F Drucker
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.
Peter F Drucker
Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.
Peter F Drucker
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
Peter F Drucker
For the person with creative potential there is no wholeness except in using it.
Robert K. Greenleaf
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.
Peter F Drucker
The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
Peter F Drucker
The best way to predict your future is to create it
Peter F Drucker
Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise.
Peter Drucker
Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
Peter F Drucker
I am convinced that any feeling of exaltation because we have people under us should be conquered for I am sure that if we enjoy being over people there will be something in our manner which will make them dislike being under us.
Mary Parker Follett
Leader and followers are both following the invisible leader-the common purpose.
Mary Parker Follett
It is not opposition but indifference which separates men.
Mary Parker Follett
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.
Peter F Drucker
Unity not uniformity must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated not annihilated not absorbed.
Mary Parker Follett
The only way to predict the future is to create it
Peter Drucker
The things we fear most in organizations-fluctuations disturbances imbalances-are the primary sources of creativity.
Margaret J. Wheatley
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.
Peter F Drucker
Faith is the choice of the nobler hypothesis.' Not the noblest, one never knows what that is. But the nobler, the best one can see when the choice is made.
Robert K. Greenleaf
The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.
Peter Drucker
There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination compromise and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants by compromise neither side gets what it wants by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.
Mary Parker Follett
One must not be afraid of a little silence. Some find silence awkward or oppressive. But a relaxed approach to dialogue will include the welcoming of some silence. It is often a devastating question to ask oneself, but it is sometimes important to ask it - 'In saying what I have in mind will I really improve on the silence?
Robert K. Greenleaf
All you need is the will and the skill
Stewart Liff
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.
Peter F Drucker
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Peter F Drucker
Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.
Peter F Drucker