Top 598 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Drucker - Page 5

Production is not the application of tools to materials, but logic to work.

Leadership is not rank, privileges, title or money. It is responsibility.

You can't manage knowledge.Knowledge is between two ears and only between two ears.

Time is the scarcest resource.

Loafing" is easy, but "leisure" is difficult.

Every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.

No business can do everything. Even if it has the money, it will never have enough good people. It has to set priorities. The worst thing to do is a little bit of everything. This makes sure that nothing is being accomplished. It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.

It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

Spontaneity is an infinite number of rehearsed possibilities.

The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today's society.

I have been saying for many years that we are using the word 'guru' only because 'charlatan' is too long to fit into a headline.

Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.

Success? Odd as it seems, you will achieve the greates results in business and career if you drop the word 'achievement' from your vocabulary and replace it with 'contribution'.

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

Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.

Unless a decision has degenerated into work, it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.

The ultimate resource in economic development is people. It is people, not capital or raw materials that develop an economy.

There are just two questions to ask to attain success in business: First, "What business am I in?" Second, "How's business?"

One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.

That people even in well paid jobs choose ever earlier retirement is a severe indictment of our organizations - not just business, but government service, the universities. These people don't find their jobs interesting.

What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter.

No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real.

The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives.

The corporation is the "master", the employee is the "servant". Because the corporation owns the means of production without which the employee could not make a living, the employee needs the corporation more than vice versa.

There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.

Education gives you neither experience nor wisdom.

In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle.

Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody - either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action.

Tomorrow always arrives. It is always different. And even the mightiest company is in trouble if it has not worked on the future. Being surprised by what happens is a risk that even the largest and richest company cannot afford, and even the smallest business need not run.

The largest 100 corporations hold 25 percent of the worldwide productive assets, which in turn control 75 percent of international trade and 98 percent of all foreign direct investment.The multinational corporation...puts the economic decision beyond the effective reach of the political process and its decision-makers, national governments.

Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.

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

The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.

Business has only two basic functions - marketing and innovation.

Communication always makes demands. It always demands that the recipient become somebody, do something, believe something. It always appeals to motivation.

The next thing to be said about what long-range planning is not, is that it does not deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions. Decisions exist only in the present. The question that faces the long-range planner is not what we should do tomorrow.

When the business grows, the person who founded it is incredibly busy. Rapid growth puts an enormous strain on a business. You outgrow your production facilities. You outgrow your management capabilities.

Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.

Work is an extension of personality. It is achievement. It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself, measures his worth, and his humanity.

The 1st question the effective decision-maker asks is: 'Is this a generic situation or an exception?'

If general perception changes from seeing the glass as 'half-full' to seeing it as 'half empty' there are major innovative opportunities.

Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.

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.

There's nothing so useless than executing a task efficiently when it actually never should have been executed at all.

I'm a writer. I could not or would not ever run a business. I don't even have a secretary. And contrary to some of the stereotypes, entrepreneurs are not loners. I am.

It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.

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.

The moment people talk of "implementing" instead of "doing," and of "finalizing" instead of "finishing," the organization is already running a fever.

Culture eats Christianity for breakfast.

To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.

Erroneous assumptions can be disastrous.

The basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge.

Working with people is difficult, but not impossible.

You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.

The greatest change in corporate culture - and the way business is being conducted - may be the accelerated growth of relationships based... on partnership.

The success and ultimately the survival of every business, large or small, depends in the last analysis on its ability to develop people. This ability is not measured by any of our conventional yardsticks of economic success; yet, is the final measurement.

There is no reason to believe that the people who staff the managerial and professional positions in our service institutions are any less qualified, any less competent or honest, or any less hard-working than the men who manage businesses. Conversely, there is no reason to believe that business managers, put in control of service institutions, would do better than the 'bureaucrats'. Indeed, we know that they immediately become bureaucrats themselves.