Peter F. Drucker: Management

Peter F. Drucker was American business consultant. Explore interesting quotes on management.
Peter F. Drucker: 360   quotes 56   likes

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

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 343

“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”

Peter F. Drucker

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

People

“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

Leadership

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

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 93, cited in Henry Mintzberg (2005) Managers Not MBAs (2005). p. 10

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

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 3, p. 681

Business

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

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 3, p. 761

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

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 2, p. 380

Way

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

Peter F. Drucker book The Essential Drucker

Source: The Essential Drucker

People

“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.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Future of Industrial Man (1942), p. 64

Decision , Sense

“A manager sets objectives - A manager organizes - A manager motivates and communicates - A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures”

Peter F. Drucker

A manager develops people.
Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 344

People , Communication , Motivation

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

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), p. 5

“…what's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There is no excuse for it. No justification. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we will pay a heavy price for it.”

Peter F. Drucker

A cantankerous interview with Peter Drucker, Wired (August 1996)
1990s and later

People

“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

Behavior , Thinking

“The subordinate's job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1990s and later, Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992), p. 138

Books , School , Business

“To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 2, p. 398

“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

Decision , Future

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

Peter F. Drucker

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

“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

History , Study , Science , Dead