Peter Drucker Quotes
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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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Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
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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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Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.
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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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There is a point at which a transformation has to take place.
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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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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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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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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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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 purpose of a business is to create a customer.
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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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...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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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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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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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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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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Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.
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Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
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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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When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
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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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The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.