Peter Drucker Quotes
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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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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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Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.
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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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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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One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.
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We will have to learn to lead people rather then to contain them.
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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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'Loafing' is easy, but 'leisure' is difficult.
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The major incentive to productivity and efficiency are social and moral rather than financial.
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Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.
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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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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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Communication is always 'propaganda.' The emitter always wants 'to get something across.'
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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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Management has authority only as long as it performs.
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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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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 of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
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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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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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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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Top management as a function and as a structure was first developed by Georg von Siemens (1839-1901) in Germany between 1870 and 1880, when he designed and built the Deutsche Bank and made it, within a very few years, into continental Europe's leading and most dynamic financial institution.
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Ideas are somewhat like babies-they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, 'This is a damn-fool idea.' Instead they ask, 'What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?'