Peter F. Drucker: Doing

Peter F. Drucker was American business consultant. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Peter F. Drucker: 360 quotes57 likes

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

Peter F. Drucker

Variant: There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

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

Peter F. Drucker book The Essential Drucker

Misattributed
Variant: Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.
Source: The Essential Drucker

“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.”

Peter F. Drucker

“The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.”

Peter F. Drucker

“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.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 2, p. 465

“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."”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1990s and later, Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992), p. 139

“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?"”

Peter F. Drucker

Managing Knowledge Means Managing Oneself Leader to Leader, No. 16 (Spring 2000)
1990s and later

“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.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 284

“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.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959), p. 111

“The moment people talk of "implementing" instead of "doing," and of "finalizing" instead of "finishing," the organization is already running a fever.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959), p. 94

“Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won't survive. It's as large a change as when we first got the printed book. Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? And for the middle-class family, college education for their children is as much of a necessity as is medical care—without it the kids have no future. Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis.”

Peter F. Drucker

Seeing things as they really are http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/0310/5905122a_7.html, Forbes (March 10, 1997) <br class="br">1990s and later

“It has been said, and only half in jest, that a tough, professionally led union is a great force for improving management performance. It forces the manager to think about what he is doing and to be able to explain his actions and behavior.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 303

“We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad, …We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order… We see change as being order itself--indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959), p. 22

“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

“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.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Future of Industrial Man (1942), p. 107-108

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

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 364

“The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 2, p. 455

“The citizen of today in every developed country is typically an employee. He works for one of the institutions. He looks to them for his livelihood. He looks to them for his opportunities. He looks to them for access to status and function in society, as well as for personal fulfillment and achievement.
The citizen of 1900 if employed worked for a small family-type operation; the small pop-and-mom store employing a helper or two; the family household; and so on. And of course, the great majority of people in those days, except in the most highly industrialized countries—such as Britain or Belgium—worked on the farm.
Our society has become an employee society. In the early 1900s people asked, “What do you do?””

Peter F. Drucker

Today they tend to ask, “Whom do you work for?”
Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), p. 4

“Once a year ask the boss, "What do I or my people do that helps you to do your job?" and "What do I or my people do that hampers you?"”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1990s and later, Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992), p. 137