Top 598 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Drucker - Page 8

The fault is in the system and not in the men.

When Henry Ford said, "The customer can have a car in any color as long as it's black," he was not joking.

Unless strategy evaluation is performed seriously and systematically, and unless strategists are willing to act on the results, energy will be used up defending yesterday.

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

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.

Salvation by society failed the most where it promised the most, in the communist countries. But it also failed in the West. Practically no government program enacted since the 1950s in the Western world - or in the communist countries - has been successful.

Yet there is nothing more dangerous than to be premature in exploiting a change in perception.

Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.

One reason for the tremendous increase in health-care costs in the U.S. is managerial neglect of the "hotel services" by the people who dominate the hospital, such as doctors and nurses.

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

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'.

Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.

Top management as a function and as a structure was first developed by Georg von Siemens (1839-1901) in Germany between 1870 and 1880, when he designed and built the Deutsche Bank and made it, within a very few years, into continental Europe's leading and most dynamic financial institution.

The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. She therefore makes sure she puts into the leadership position, into the standard-setting, the performance-making position the person who has the strength to do the outstanding pacesetting job. This always requires focus on the one strength of a person and dismissal of weaknesses as irrelevant unless they hamper the full deployment of the available strength.

Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order... catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society.

Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.

Quality of character doesn't make a leader, but the lack of it flaws the entire process.

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

The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, "If we assign this general to lead this base, what do we expect him to accomplish?"

Never underrate the boss! The boss may look illiterate. He may look stupid. But there is no risk at all in overrating a boss. If you underrate him he will bitterly resent it or impute to you the deficiency in brains and knowledge you imputed to him.

The single minded ones, the monomaniacs, are the only true achievers

We always remember best the irrelevant.

Most innovators are successful to the extent to which they define risks and confine them.

The computer actually may have aggravated management's degenerative tendency to focus inward on costs.

Look at government programs for the past fifty years. Every single one - except warfare - achieved the exact opposite of its announced goal.

Some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I've worked with over a sixty-five-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses.

Unless we realize that the essence of Nazism is also an attempt to solve a universal problem of Western civilization - that of the industrial society - and that the basic principles on which the Nazis base this attempt are also in no way confined to Germany, we do not know what we fight for or what we fight against... The war is being fought for the structure of industrial society - its basic principles, its purposes, and its institutions.

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.

People are effective because they say 'no,' because they say, 'this isn't for me.'

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.

Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes - it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.

No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary people perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each person's strength to help all the other members perform.

"The area in which the executive first encounters the challenge of strength is in staffing. The effective executive fills positions and promotes on the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to minimize weaknesses but to maximize strength."

Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the 'naturals,' the ones who somehow know how to teach.

That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society "post-capitalist.

The Welfare State, which begun in Imperial Germany for the truly indigent and disabled, has now become "everybody's entitlement" and an increasing burden on those who produce.

Sören Kierkegaard has another answer: human existence is possible as existence not in despair, as existence not in tragedy; it is possible as existence in faith... Faith is the belief that in God the impossible is possible, that in Him time and eternity are one, that both life and death are meaningful.

To arrive at the definition of the problem he must begin by finding the 'critical factor'. This is the element (or elements) in the situation that has to be changed before anything else can be changed, moved, acted upon.

Every first-rate editor I have ever heard of reads, edits and rewrites every word that goes into his publication.... Good editors are not 'permissive'; they do not let their colleagues do 'their thing'; they make sure that everybody does the 'paper's thing.' A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done.

The real development I've seen of people in organizations, especially in big ones, comes from their being volunteers in a nonprofit organization - where you have responsibility, you see results, and you quickly learn what your values are. There is no better way to understand your strengths and discover where you belong than to volunteer in a nonprofit. That is probably the great opportunity for the social sector - and especially in its relationship to business.

Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise.

The great mystery isn't that people do things badly but that they occasionally do a few things well. The only thing that is universal is incompetence. Strength is always specific! Nobody ever commented, for example, that the great violinist Jascha Heifetz probably couldn't play the trumpet very well.

A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.

The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.

Successful people know they need to get many things done-and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate their time and energy on doing one thing at a time-and on doing first things firs.

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

I would hope that American managers-indeed, managers worldwide-continue to appreciate what I have been saying almost from day one: that management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege, that it is much more than "making deals." Management affects people and their lives.

The most important work of the executive is to identify the changes that have already happened. The important thing . . . is to exploit the changes that have already occurred and to use them as opportunities.

If you're not living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space. The best way to predict the future is to create it.

If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total depression.

Promotion should not be more important than accomplishment, or avoiding instability more important than taking the right risk.

Thus, for those who are willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovation opportunity.

Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but the test of their validity.

The Pertinent Question is NOT how to do things right - but how to find the right things to do, and to concentrate resources and efforts on them.

We can't make people better by trying to eliminate their weaknesses, but we can help then perform better by building on their strengths.

Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people -- and allow people to place themselves -- according to their strengths.

It is commonly believed that innovations create changes - but few ever do. Successful innovations exploit changes that have already happened.

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

The dilemma of modern society: the conflict between the need for capital formation at a high rate and the popular condemnation of interest and dividends as "unearned income" and "capitalist," if not as sinful and wicked.