Top 598 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Drucker - Page 10

The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.

What people in business think they know about the customer and market is likely to be more wrong than right...the customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him.

One either meets or one works.

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

Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.

The postwar [WWII] GI Bill of Rights - and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans - signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century. We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world.

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

If you want it, measure it. If you can't measure it, forget it.

True marketing starts...with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?" It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"

Succession planning often results in the selection of a weaker representation of yourself.

No matter how deeply wedded one may be to the free enterprise system (and I, for one, am wedded for life), one has to accept the need for positive government; one has to consider government action on a sizable scale as desirable rather than as a necessary evil.

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.

Profit is not a cause but a result-

Leadership is all hype. We've had three great leaders in this century-Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad, ...We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order... We see change as being order itself - indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one.

One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.

The one to distrust is the person who never makes a mistake, never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried and the trivial.

Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?

The computer, being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data.

The enterprise can fulfill its human and social functions only if it prospers as a business.

That the government's power under the Taft-Hartley Act to stop a strike by injunction so clearly strengthens the hand of the employer-even though it is used only when a strike threatens the national health, welfare, or safety-is a grave blemish and explains much of union resistance to the Act.

Too many leaders try to do a little bit of 25 things and get nothing done. They are very popular because they always say yes. But they get nothing done.

The final test of greatness in a CEO is how well he chooses a successor and whether he can step aside and let the successor run the company.

There is a point at which a transformation has to take place.

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.

The race for Quality has no finish line - so technically, it's more like a death march. Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

I have no interest in celebrities. If all the superrich disappeared, the world economy would not even notice. The superrich are irrelevant to the economy.

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 operates-and all the major events within it-must have rhyme, rhythm, or reason.

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

The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.

The healthier a new venture and the faster it grows, the more financial feeding it requires.

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

The best plan is only a plan... unless it degerates into work.

If something fails despite being carefully planned, carefully designed, and conscientiously executed, that failure often bespeaks underlying change and, with it, opportunity.

Decision making is the specific executive task.

If a government commission had worked on the horse, you would have the first horse that could operate its knee joint in both directions. The trouble is it couldn't have stood up.

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

One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work.

The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.

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.

Far too much reorganization goes on all the time. Organizitis is like a spastic colon.

What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can't be very good.

Political freedom is neither easy nor automatic, neither pleasant nor secure. It is the responsibility of the individual for the decisions of society as if they were his own decisions-as in moral truth and accountability they are.

In the next economic downturn there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the supercorporate chieftains who pay themselves millions. In every major economic downturn in US history the villains have been the heroes during the preceding boom.

We have tried to substitute mass for purpose. We have tried to regain military potency of defense by making it gigantic, unwieldy, complex. It never works.

"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.

No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.

The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves.

There are companies that are good at improving what they're already doing. There are companies that are good at extending what they're doing. And finally there are companies that are good at innovation. Every large company has to be able to do all three - improve, extend, and innovate - simultaneously.

In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.

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

Mother Teresa's numerical results were not her greatest contribution. Instead, she made the world-and especially India-conscious of compassion.

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

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

All companies are service companies; some also manufacture products.

The more successful the unit, the more difficult it is to make sure that the large company doesn't put the same expectations on it as it does for the rest of the company. When it's a new venture, whether it's outside or inside the business, it's a child. And you don't put a 40-pound pack on a 6-year-old's back when you take her hiking.

The large organization has to learn to innovate, or it won't survive.

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