Top 598 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Drucker - Page 9

The need to manage oneself is creating a revolution in human affairs.

An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.

I'm better about things than about people. I'm more interested in people, but I'm better at ideas.

Managers are agents of transformation, converting the workforce in developed countries from one of manual workers to one of highly educated knowledge workers.

The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.

Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

The enterprise, by definition, must be capable of producing more or better than all the resources that comprise it.

The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is ... to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker

The paradox of the prophet: his very success is his failure. The prophet whose time has come no longer shocks; he entertains.

[The masses] ... must turn their hopes toward a miracle. In the depths of their despair reason cannot be believed, truth must be false, and lies must be truth. "Higher bread prices," "lower bread prices," "unchanged bread prices" have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread price which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason.

Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills - accounting and what have you - but you can't teach them management.

Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution.

If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the "bourgeois" under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource.

...because knowledge rapidly deteriorates unless it is used constantly, maintaining within an organization an activity that is used only intermittently guarantees incompetence.

The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.

It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, ...The enterprise must demand it of him.

Through systematic terror, through indoctrination, through systematic manipulation of stimulus, reward, and punishment, we can today break man and convert him into brute animal... The first step toward survival is therefore to make government legitimate again by attempting to deprive it of these powers... by international action to ban such powers.

The individual needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of his Creator and subject to Him.

If a manager spends more than 10 percent of his time on "human relations" the group is probably too large.

When a resource is scarce, you increase its yield.

It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.

Leadership is more doing than dash.

[Entrepreneurship] is by no means hunch or gamble. But it also is not precisely science. Rather, it is judgment.

Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management.

Our society has become an employee society.

Financial "synergy" is a will-o'-the-wisp.It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice.

Miracles are great, but they're so damn unpredictable.

Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.

We do not need more laws . No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model .

The monomaniac is unlikely to succeed. Most leave only their bleached bones in the roadless desert. But the rest of us, with our multiple interests instead of a single mission, are certain to fail and have no impact at all.

Education can no longer be the sole property of the state.

There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology , society , economy , and institutions .

The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.

The fundamental reality for every worker, from sweeper to executive vice-president, is the eight hours or so that he spends on the job. In our society of organizations, it is the job through which the great majority has access to achievement, to fulfillment, and to community.

Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise.

Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.

Managing innovation will increasingly become a challenge to management, and especially to top management, and a touchstone of its competence.

A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.

What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady and continuous.

Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese.

A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.

There is the general belief that the corporation income tax is a tax on the "rich" and on the "fat cats." But with pension funds owning 30% of American large business-and soon to own 50%-the corporation income tax, in effect, eases the load on those in top income brackets and penalizes the beneficiaries of pension funds.

Few relationships are as critical to the business enterprise as the relationship to the government. Managers have responsibility for this relationship as part of their responsibility to the enterprise itself. It is an area of social impact of the business. To a large extent the relationship to government results from what businesses do or fail to do.

Schools will change more in the next 30 years than they have since the invention of the printed book.

Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.

No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.

Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!

Leadership is all about getting results.

When it rains manna from heaven, some people put up an umbrella. Others reach for a big spoon.

In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise.

A fundamental responsibility of leadership is make sure that everybody knows the mission, understands it, lives it.

[Management] has authority only as long as it performs.

In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for"... On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to [by both] the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration.

Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.

The world political system is till based on the concept of the national sovereign state. For the first time therefore, in three hundred years economy and sovereignty are becoming divorced from each other.

It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people: a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are told.

Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity that causes it, this is therefore the best-indeed the only truly good-solution.

Keep the boss aware. Bosses, after all, are held responsible by their own bosses for the performance of their subordinates. They must be able to say: "I know what Anne [or John] is trying to do."

In a rural society communities are "given" for the individual. Community is a fact, whether family or religion, social class or caste.

The world economy is not yet a community--not even an economic community...Yet the existence of the "global shopping center" is a fact that cannot be undone. The vision of an economy for all will not be forgotten again.