Peter Drucker Quotes
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Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.
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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 basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives.
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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.'
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The society of organizations\\ is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.
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So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
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The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.
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Financial 'synergy' is a will-o'-the-wisp.It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice.
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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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Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.
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The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves...
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The moment people talk of 'implementing' instead of 'doing,' and of 'finalizing' instead of 'finishing,' the organization is already running a fever.
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This is a political book... It has a political purpose: to strengthen the will to maintain freedom against the threat of its abandonment in favor of totalitarianism.
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The subordinate's job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual.
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The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.
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Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.
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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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Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.
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The fault is in the system and not in the men.
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p. 4
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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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Never mind your happiness; do your duty.
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The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.
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No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.