Top 598 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Drucker - Page 4

The worker's effectiveness is determined largely by the way he is being managed.

You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers - because without trust, they won't fight.

Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.

One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.

To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.

The only industries that function well are the industries that take responsibility for training. The Japanese, you know, assume that when you first come to work you know absolutely nothing. School isn't preparation for work and never was.

No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility.

The company is not and must never claim to be home, family, religion, life or fate for the individual. It must never interfere in his private life or his citizenship. He is tied to the company through a voluntary and cancellable employment contract, not through some mystical or indissoluble bond.

If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.

Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability and to prevent, or at least slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work - on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself - it must be organized for constant change.

Important decisions are risky. They should be controversial. Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework.

Trees die from the top”. No one should ever become a strategist unless he or she is willing to have his or her character serve as a model for subordinates

Use feedback analysis to identify your strengths. Then go to work on improving your strengths. Identify and eliminate bad habits that hinder the full development of your strengths. Figure out what you should do and do it. Finally, decide what you should not do.

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out.

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.

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

There is one qualification the manager cannot acquire but must bring to the task. It is not genius; it is character.

The knowledge we now consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information effective in action, information focused on results. Results are outside the person, in society and economy, or in the advancement of knowledge itself. To accomplish anything this knowledge has to be highly specialized.

There are no creeds in mathematics.

The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it.

The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago.

There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.

The better a man is the more mistakes will he make – for the more new things he will try.

Vision without execution is delusion. The joy is in the results

One does not "manage" people. The task is to lead people.

(Waste = Loss): The first rule of business is to survive and the guiding principle of business economics is not the maximisation of profit, it is the avoidance of loss

Systematic change requires a willingness to look on change as an opportunity.

If you want to know what the future is, be part of its development.

The correct assumption is that what individuals have learned by age twenty-one will begin to become obsolete five to ten years later and will have to be replaced-or at least refurbished-by new learning, new skills, new knowledge.

Our most important education system is in the employees' own organization.

Look upon every obstacle as part payment towards your success.

Leaders grow; they are not made.

We've spent the last 30 years focusing on the T in IT, and we'll spend the next 30 years focusing on the I.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the one predictable thing in any organization is the crisis. That always comes. That's when you do depend on the leader: The job of the leader is to build an organization that is battle-ready, that has high morale, that knows how to behave, that trusts itself, and where people trust one another.

To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.

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.

People in any organization, including bureaucrats and politicians, are always attached to the obsolete; the obsolescent; the things that should have worked but didn't; the things that once were productive and no longer are.

Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business - in demographics, in values, in technology or science - and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.

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.

I think the growth industry of the future in this country and the world will soon be the continuing education of adults. ...I think the educated person of the future is somebody who realizes the need to continue to learn. That is the new definition and it is going to change the world we live in and work in.

The most effective way to manage change is to create it.

Management and entrepreneurship are only two different dimensions of the same task. An entrepreneur who does not learn how to manage will not last long. A management that does not learn to innovate will not last long.

Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not bounced.

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

If you want to predict the future create it.

The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him.

People who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs.

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

Every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise.

To succeed in this new world, we will have to learn, first, who we are. Few people, even highly successful people, can answer the questions, Do you know what you're good at? Do you know what you need to learn so that you get the full benefit of your strengths? Few have even asked themselves these questions.

Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. SO for more than 60 years I have kept studying one subject at a time.

Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.

Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity

Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.

Management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.

It is willingness of people to give of themselves over and above the demands of the job that distinguishes the great from the merely adequate.

Ideas are somewhat like babies - they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, "This is a damn-fool idea." Instead they ask, "What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?"

Business is society's change agent.

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.

The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society.