Top 598 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Drucker - Page 3

The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.

In the managerial organization, the top people sit in judgment; in the innovative organization it is their job to encourage ideas, no matter how unripe or crude.

Defending yesterday is far more risky than making tomorrow.

The essence of management is to make knowledge productive.

What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or a service does for the customer.

Effective people are not problem minded; they're opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively.

There is no perfect strategic decision. One always has to pay a price. One always has to balance conflicting objectives, conflicting opinions, and conflicting priorities. The best strategic decision is only an approximation - and a risk.

What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

You can't manage what you don't measure.

Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are a means to mobilize resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.

Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything.

The true business of every company is to make and keep customers.

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

Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.

Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.

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

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

The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.

No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.

We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

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

The greatest challenge to organizations is the balance between continuity and change. You need both. At different times, the balance is slightly more over here, or slightly more over there, but you need both. And balance is basically the greatest task in leadership. Organizations have to have continuity, and yet if there is not enough new challenge, not enough change, they become empty bureaucracies, awfully fast.

There are only two things in a business that make money - innovation and marketing, everything else is cost.

I no longer think that learning how to manage people, especially subordinates, is the most important for executives to learn. I am teaching above all else, how to manage oneself.

In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside.The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a satisfied patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise there are only costs.

To make the future demands courage. It demands work. But it also demands faith.

What's measured improves

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

Every enterprise is learning and teaching institution. Training and development must be built into it on all levels, training and development that never stop.

Replace your pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution.

Follow effective action with quiet reflection.

Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen.

Listening is not a skill; it is a discipline.

Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures.

Leadership is defined by results not attributes.

Ideas are like frog eggs: you've got to lay a thousand to hatch one.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works.

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

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.

During periods of discontinuous, abrupt change, the essence of adaptation involves a keen sensitivity to what should be abandoned - not what should be changed or introduced. A willingness to depart from the familiar has distinct survival value.

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.

Knowledge is power, which is why people who had it in the past often tried to make a secret of it. In post-capitalism, power comes from transmitting information to make it productive, not from hiding it.

Organizations are no longer built on force, but on trust.

Most organizations staff their problems & starve their opportunities.

Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong... And yet, a person can perform only from strength.

Strategic management is not a box of tricks or a bundle of techniques. It is analytical thinking and commitment of resources to action. But quantification alone is not planning. Some of the most important issues in strategic management cannot be quantified at all.

Knowledge people and service people learn the most when they teach .

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.

It’s up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.

Systematic decision review also shows executives their own weaknesses, particularly the areas in which they are simply incompetent. In these areas, smart executives don't make decisions or take actions. They delegate.

It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem - which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.

It's more important to do the right thing than to do things right.

Do the right things instead of trying to do everything right.

To make a living is no longer enough. Work also has to make a life.

Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined.

Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up.

For new technology to replace old, it has to have at least ten times the benefit.

Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.