Peter Drucker Quotes
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Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.
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Communication is always 'propaganda.' The emitter always wants 'to get something across.'
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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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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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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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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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Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.
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Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.
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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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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 definite trend in Italy and Germany to eliminate profit participation and the ownership rights of nonmanaging partners and shareholders.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.
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There is a point at which a transformation has to take place.
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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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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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Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.
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The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.