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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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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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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Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.
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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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The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.
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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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p. 4
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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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So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
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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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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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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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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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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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Never mind your happiness; do your duty.
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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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The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.
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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.
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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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The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.
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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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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.'