Peter Drucker Quotes
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It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.
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No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.
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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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'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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It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, ...The enterprise must demand it of him.
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A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.
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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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The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.
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Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
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...what's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There is no excuse for it. No justification. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we will pay a heavy price for it.
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We still think and talk of the basic problems of an industrial society as problems that can be solved by changing the system, that is the superstructure of political organization. Yet the real problems lie within the industrial enterprise. ...our representative institution... a mirror in which we look when we want to see ourselves.
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Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.
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The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
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Management has authority only as long as it performs.
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The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
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In addition, profits are so completely subordinated in Germany and Italy to requirements of a militarily conceived national interest and of full employment that the maintenance of the profit principle is purely theoretical. Profits have lost their autonomy as an independent, not to say the supreme, goal of economic activity.
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The Nazi agitator whom, many years ago, I heard proclaim to a wildly cheering peasants’ meeting: ‘We don’t want lower bread prices, we don’t want higher bread prices, we don’t want unchanged bread prices-we want National-Socialist bread prices,’ came nearer explaining fascism than anybody I have heard since.
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Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.
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That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society 'post-capitalist.
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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?'
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Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.
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The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.
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There is a point at which a transformation has to take place.