Peter F. Drucker: Trending quotes

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”