Peter Drucker Quotes
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We do not need more laws. No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model.
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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.
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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.
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The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
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As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it.
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The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it.
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Equally striking is the fact that racial anti-Semitism was not taken seriously even by the great majority of Nazis. ‘It is just a catchword to attract voters’ was a standing phrase which everybody repeated and believed, and that I took it seriously was more than once regarded as definite proof of my stupidity and gullibility.
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Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will... be taken over by a Central government...
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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.
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A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.
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A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.
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One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.
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There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology, society, economy, and institutions.
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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.
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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
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Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.
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No matter how deeply wedded one may be to the free enterprise system (and I, for one, am wedded for life), one has to accept the need for positive government; one has to consider government action on a sizable scale as desirable rather than as a necessary evil.
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Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.
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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.
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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.
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We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.
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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.
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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.
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There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.