Peter Drucker Quotes
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All economic activity is by definition 'high risk.' And defending yesterday-that is, not innovating-is far more risky than making tomorrow.
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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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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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Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.
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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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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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When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
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Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the 'naturals', the ones who somehow know how to teach.
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To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.
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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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A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.
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Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.
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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 best way to predict the future is to create it.
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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.'
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Decisions exist only in the present.
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The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.
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It has been said, and only half in jest, that a tough, professionally led union is a great force for improving management performance. It forces the manager to think about what he is doing and to be able to explain his actions and behavior.
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We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.
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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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For if this country... were to make its defense program a function of its domestic employment situation, it would become impossible to conduct a constructive and well-thought out foreign policy or to develop any lasting collaboration.
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The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.
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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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Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations... They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.'