Peter Drucker Quotes
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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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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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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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There is a point at which a transformation has to take place.
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Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.
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Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
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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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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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It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, ...The enterprise must demand it of him.
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Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.
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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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The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
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Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
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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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Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.
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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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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 ‘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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Political freedom is neither easy nor automatic, neither pleasant nor secure. It is the responsibility of the individual for the decisions of society as if they were his own decisions-as in moral truth and accountability they are.
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Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. And it has been proven as much of an illusion in Stalinist Russia as it proven an illusion in pre-Hitler Germany. Communism in anything but name was abandoned in Russia when the Five-Year Plan was substituted for the New Economic Policy (NEP) after Lenin’s death.
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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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Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.
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Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management.
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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.