Peter Drucker Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe.
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There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.
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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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Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.
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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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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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Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
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The major incentive to productivity and efficiency are social and moral rather than financial.
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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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Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
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Communication is always 'propaganda.' The emitter always wants 'to get something across.'
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One reason for the tremendous increase in health-care costs in the U.S. is managerial neglect of the 'hotel services' by the people who dominate the hospital, such as doctors and nurses.
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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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'Loafing' is easy, but 'leisure' is difficult.
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Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.
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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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'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.