Best 478 quotes of Peter Drucker on MyQuotes

Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.

A business enterprise must continue beyond the lifetime of the individual or of the generation to be capable of producing its contributions to economy and to society.

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.

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.

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

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.

A fundamental responsibility of leadership is make sure that everybody knows the mission, understands it, lives it.

All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.

All economic activity is by definition "high risk." And defending yesterday--that is, not innovating--is far more risky than making tomorrow.

All great change in business has come from outside the firm, not from inside.

Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.

Although he reputedly hated the label of 'guru', Peter Drucker was, by any standards, the greatest management guru the world has yet seen. In 1996, the McKinsey Quarterly journal described him as the 'the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow' and Robert Heller described him as 'the greatest man in the history of management', praise indeed for a man who described himself as 'just an old journalist'.

A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.

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

A manager sets objectives - A manager organizes - A manager motivates and communicates - A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures - A manager develops people.

A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant - and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates.

A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.

And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.

An effective executive builds on strengths - their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates, and on the strength of the situation.

An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance... Any attempt to go beyond that is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no "loyalty," he owes no "love" and no "attitudes" - he owes performance and nothing else. .... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.

An employer has no business with a man's personality... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.

An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.

An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.

An institution which is financed by a budget - or which enjoys a monopoly which the customer cannot escape - is rewarded for what it deserves rather than what it earns. It is paid for 'good intentions' and 'programs'. It is paid for not alienating important constituents rather than satisfying any one group. It is misdirected by the way it is being paid into defining performance and results as what will produce the budget rather than as what will produce contribution.

An organization belongs on a sick list when promotion becomes more important to its people than accomplishment of their job they are in. It is sick when it is more concerned with avoiding mistakes than with taking risks, with counteracting the weaknesses of its members than with building on their strength. But it is sick also when "good human relations" become more important than performance and achievement.

An organization which just perpetuates today's level of vision, excellence, and accomplishment has lost the capacity to adapt.

Any organisation develops people; it either forms them or deforms them.

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

A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.

As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.

A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.

As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel.

A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.

As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it.

Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are manual labor.

...because knowledge rapidly deteriorates unless it is used constantly, maintaining within an organization an activity that is used only intermittently guarantees incompetence.

Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual. They fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

Business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

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.

Business has only two basic functions - marketing and innovation.

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.

Business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.

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

But innovation is more than a new method. It is a new view of the universe, as one of risk rather than of chance or of certainty. It is a new view of man's role in the universe; he creates order by taking risks. And this means that innovation, rather than being an assertion of human power, is an acceptance of human responsibility.

Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past.

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.

Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.

Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive.

Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change

Communication is always "propaganda." The emitter always wants "to get something across.