Peter Drucker Quotes
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The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.
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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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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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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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One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.
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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.
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Growth as a goal, to repeat, is delusion. William James, the American philosopher, talked of the 'bitch goddess success.' A philosopher of business today might well talk of the 'bitch goddess growth.'
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'Loafing' is easy, but 'leisure' is difficult.
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The world political system is till based on the concept of the national sovereign state. For the first time therefore, in three hundred years economy and sovereignty are becoming divorced from each other.
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'Value added' is a meaningless concept for a retail business , for a bank, for a life insurance company, and for any other business which is not primarily engaged in manufacturing.
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With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe.
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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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And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.
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Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
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Tomorrow everybody - or practically everybody - will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.
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It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.
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We will have to learn to lead people rather then to contain them.
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The major incentive to productivity and efficiency are social and moral rather than financial.
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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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Communication is always 'propaganda.' The emitter always wants 'to get something across.'
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Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
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There is an unbroken chain of opposition to the introduction of economic freedom and to the capitalist autonomy of the economic sphere... In every case the opposition could only be overcome - peacefully or by force - because of the promise of capitalism to establish equality... That this promise was an illusion we all know.
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Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
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Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.