Peter F. Drucker: Trending quotes

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Peter F. Drucker: 360 quotes57 likes

“A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 43

“That the government's power under the Taft-Hartley Act to stop a strike by injunction so clearly strengthens the hand of the employer--even though it is used only when a strike threatens the national health, welfare, or safety--is a grave blemish and explains much of union resistance to the Act.”

Peter F. Drucker

1930s- 1950s, The New Society (1950)

“The postwar [WWII] GI Bill of Rights - and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans - signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century.
We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1990s and later, Post-Capitalist Society (1993), p. 3

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

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 2, p. 513

“Of course, every revolution repudiates what went on before and considers itself a conscious break with the past; it is only posterity that sees, or imagines it sees, the historical continuity. Fascism, however, goes much further in its negation of the past than any earlier political movement, because it makes this negation its main platform. What is even more important, it denies simultaneously ideas and tendencies which are in themselves antithetic.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 13

“For the social ecologist language is not "communication." It is not just "message." It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communication…. Social ecologists need not be "great" writers; but they have to be respectful writers, caring writers.”

Peter F. Drucker

The Ecological Vision (1993)
1990s and later

“The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves…”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959), p. 144

“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.”

Peter F. Drucker

The Age of Discontinuity (1969)
1960s - 1980s

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

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 333

“[T]he enemy of totalitarian Nazism is not in the East. It is not Russian communism. The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxist socialism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, noneconomic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following… During the last few years Russia has therefore been forced to adopt one purely totalitarian and fascist principle after the other; not, it must be emphasized, because of a ‘Stalinist conspiracy,” but because there was no other possibility.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), pp. 245-246

“We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Future of Industrial Man (1942), p. 96

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

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1990s and later, Post-Capitalist Society (1993), p. 45

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

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 301

“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.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1990s and later, Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992), p. 140

“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.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 3, p. 739

“As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 182

“[T]he ‘total state’ of fascism is not a political alignment within the existing political and social setup, but that it is a revolution which, like all revolutions, works from without.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 9

“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.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 327

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

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 41

“Frederick W. Taylor was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study. On Taylor's 'scientific management' rests, above all, the tremendous surge of affluence in the last seventy-five years which has lifted the working masses in the developed countries well above any level recorded before, even for the well-to-do. Taylor, though the Isaac Newton (or perhaps the Archimedes) of the science of work, laid only first foundations, however. Not much has been added to them since – even though he has been dead all of sixty years.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 181