Peter F. Drucker Quotes

“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.”

“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”

“Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.”

“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”

“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”

“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.”

“People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”

“Morale in an organization does not mean that "people get along together"; the test is performance not conformance.”

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

“People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.”

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

“There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.”

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

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

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”

“Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.”

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”

“The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission.”

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

“As for the explanation that fascism is a last desperate attempt of capitalism to delay the socialist revolution, it simply is not true. It is not true that ‘big business’ promoted fascism. On the contrary, both in Italy and in Germany the proportion of fascist sympathizers and backers was smallest in the industrial and financial classes. It is equally untrue that ‘big business’ profits from fascism; of all the classes it probably suffers most from totalitarian economics and Wehrwirtschaft.”

“Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations; most computer users have found that they now need more, and more expensive clerks, even though they call them "operators" or "programmers.”

“The days of the 'intuitive' manager are numbered.”

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

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

“Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions.”

“One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.”

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

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

“The best way to predict your future is to create it”

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.”

“Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.”

“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”

“What's measured improves”

“Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.”

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

“This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship - the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”

“Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.”

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

“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship… the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”

“Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.”

“Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.”

“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.”

“In addition, profits are so completely subordinated in Germany and Italy to requirements of a militarily conceived national interest and of full employment that the maintenance of the profit principle is purely theoretical. Profits have lost their autonomy as an independent, not to say the supreme, goal of economic activity.”

“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.”

“The Nazi agitator whom, many years ago, I heard proclaim to a wildly cheering peasants’ meeting: ‘We don’t want lower bread prices, we don’t want higher bread prices, we don’t want unchanged bread prices—we want National-Socialist bread prices,’ came nearer explaining fascism than anybody I have heard since.”

“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."”

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

“…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.”

“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.”

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

“If "socialism" is defined as "ownership of the means of production"--and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition--then the United States is the first truly Socialist country.”

“Knowing Yourself …We also seldom know what gifts we are not endowed with. We will have to learn where we belong, what we have to learn to get the full benefit from our strengths, where our weaknesses lie, what our values are. We also have to know ourselves temperamentally: "Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? What am I committed to? And what is my contribution?"”

“The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.”

“In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers, is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power.”

“Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. And it has been proven as much of an illusion in Stalinist Russia as it proven an illusion in pre-Hitler Germany. Communism in anything but name was abandoned in Russia when the Five-Year Plan was substituted for the New Economic Policy (NEP) after Lenin’s death.”

“Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.”

“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.”

“Of these denials of European tradition one is especially important: that is the refutation of the demand that the political and social order and the authority set up under it have to justify themselves as benefiting their subjects. Hardly any other concept or idea of our past is held up to so much ridicule by fascism as that of the justification of power. ‘Power is its own justification’ is regarded as self-evident. Nothing shows better how far the totalitarian revolution has already gone than the general acceptance of this new maxim throughout Europe as a matter of course… Not even the most fanatical advocates of absolute monarchy would have dared to justify the sovereign otherwise.”

“…human beings need community. If there are no communities available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities… Only the social sector, that is, the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, can create what we now need, communities for citizens… What the dawning 21st century needs above all is equally explosive growth of the nonprofit social sector in building communities in the newly dominant social environment, the city.”