Peter Drucker citations

Page 2

“C’est la nature du savoir de changer rapidement et de transformer les certitudes d’aujourd’hui en absurdités de demain.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”