Peter Drucker Quotes
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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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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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Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
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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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Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity that causes it, this is therefore the best-indeed the only truly good-solution.
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There is a point at which a transformation has to take place.
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Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management.
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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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Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
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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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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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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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Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.
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The ‘total state’ of fascism is not a political alignment within the existing political and social setup, but that it is a revolution which, like all revolutions, works from without.
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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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Once a year ask the boss, 'What do I or my people do that helps you to do your job?' and 'What do I or my people do that hampers you?'
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Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.
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The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
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Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.
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When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
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Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.
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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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The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
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Engineers speak half–jokingly about Murphy's Law: ' If anything can go wrong, it will.' But complexity stands under a second law as well. Let me call it Drucker's law: 'If one thing goes wrong, everything else will, and at the same time.'