Peter Drucker Quotes
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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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Morale in an organization does not mean that 'people get along together'; the test is performance not conformance.
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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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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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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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So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
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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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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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p. 4
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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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I think the growth industry of the future in this country and the world will soon be the continuing education of adults. ...I think the educated person of the future is somebody who realizes the need to continue to learn. That is the new definition and it is going to change the world we live in and work in.
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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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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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In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers, is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power.
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Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.
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Never mind your happiness; do your duty.
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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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The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives.
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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 rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.
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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 new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.
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Increasingly, politics is not about 'who gets what, when, how' but about values, each of them considered to be absolute. Politics is about 'the right to life'...It is about the environment. It is about gaining equality for groups alleged to be oppressed...None of these issues is economic. All are fundamentally moral.
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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.