Peter Drucker Quotes
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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 manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it.
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The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
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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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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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- A manager sets objectives - A manager organizes - A manager motivates and communicates - A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures - A manager develops people.
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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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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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A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.
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Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution.
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Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.
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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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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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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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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.
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Through systematic terror, through indoctrination, through systematic manipulation of stimulus, reward, and punishment, we can today break man and convert him into brute animal... The first step toward survival is therefore to make government legitimate again by attempting to deprive it of these powers... by international action to ban such powers.
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A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.
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Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.
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There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.
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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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I would hope that American managers - indeed, managers worldwide - continue to appreciate what I have been saying almost from day one: that management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege, that it is much more than 'making deals.' Management affects people and their lives.
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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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Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.
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One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.