Peter Drucker Quotes & Sayings

Strategic management is not a box of tricks or a bundle of techniques. It is analytical thinking and commitment of resources to action. But quantification alone is not planning. Some of the most important issues in strategic management cannot be quantified at all. — Peter Drucker

Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things. — Peter Drucker

To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business. — Peter Drucker

The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it's selling. — Peter Drucker

Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don't have enough of it, you're out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you're really missing something. — Peter Drucker

The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things. — Peter Drucker

An organization which just perpetuates today's level of vision, excellence, and accomplishment has lost the capacity to adapt. — Peter Drucker

If a government commission had worked on the horse, you would have the first horse that could operate its knee joint in both directions. The trouble is it couldn't have stood up. — Peter Drucker

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it. — Peter Drucker

All great change in business has come from outside the firm, not from inside. — Peter Drucker

What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or a service does for the customer. — Peter Drucker

One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it. — Peter Drucker

In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for" ... On the whole throughout this period the man
or party
that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to [by both] the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration. — Peter Drucker

One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work. — Peter Drucker

To make the future demands courage. It demands work. But it also demands faith. — Peter Drucker

There are companies that are good at improving what they're already doing. There are companies that are good at extending what they're doing. And finally there are companies that are good at innovation. Every large company has to be able to do all three - improve, extend, and innovate - simultaneously. — Peter Drucker

When a resource is scarce, you increase its yield. — Peter Drucker

More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject. — Peter Drucker

Many studies of research scientists have shown that achievement (at least below the genius level of an Einstein, Bohr, or a Planck) depends less on ability in doing research than on the courage to go after opportunity. — Peter Drucker

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. — Peter Drucker

Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise. — Peter Drucker

People are effective because they say 'no,' because they say, 'this isn't for me.' — Peter Drucker

Promotion should not be more important than accomplishment, or avoiding instability more important than taking the right risk. — Peter Drucker

Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time. — Peter Drucker

People learn the most when teaching others. — Peter Drucker

Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior ... — Peter Drucker

Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing. — Peter Drucker

The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is ... to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker — Peter Drucker

Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person - hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre - into an outstanding performer. — Peter Drucker

That the government's power under the Taft-Hartley Act to stop a strike by injunction so clearly strengthens the hand of the employer-even though it is used only when a strike threatens
the national health, welfare, or safety-is a grave blemish and explains much of union resistance to the Act. — Peter Drucker

It is commonly believed that innovations create changes - but few ever do. Successful innovations exploit changes that have already happened. — Peter Drucker

Time is the scarcest resource ... — Peter Drucker

If you want it, measure it. If you can't measure it, forget it. — Peter Drucker

By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else. — Peter Drucker

I'm better about things than about people. I'm more interested in people, but I'm better at ideas. — Peter Drucker

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. — Peter Drucker

If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total
depression. — Peter Drucker

Ideas are cheap and abundant; what is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action. — Peter Drucker

If you want to predict the future create it. — Peter Drucker

The greatest challenge to organizations is the balance between continuity and change. You need both. At different times, the balance is slightly more over here, or slightly more over there, but you need both. And balance is basically the greatest task in leadership. Organizations have to have continuity, and yet if there is not enough new challenge, not enough change, they become empty bureaucracies, awfully fast. — Peter Drucker

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. — Peter Drucker

Knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant-and perhaps even the only-source of competitive advantage. — Peter Drucker

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer. — Peter Drucker

It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. — Peter Drucker

Few relationships are as critical to the business enterprise itself as the relationship to government. The manager has responsibility for this relationship as part of his responsibility to the enterprise itself. To a large extent the relationship to government results from what businesses do or fail to do. — Peter Drucker

Quality of character doesn't make a leader, but the lack of it flaws the entire process. — Peter Drucker

It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people: a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are told. — Peter Drucker

The enterprise can fulfill its human and social functions only if it prospers as a business. — Peter Drucker

The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it's dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it. — Peter Drucker

The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it. — Peter Drucker

Education can no longer be the sole property of the state. — Peter Drucker

Spontaneity is an infinite number of rehearsed possibilities. — Peter Drucker

(Waste = Loss): The first rule of business is to survive and the guiding principle of business economics is not the maximisation of profit, it is the avoidance of loss — Peter Drucker

Financial " synergy " is a will-o'-the-wisp.It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice. — Peter Drucker

It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, The enterprise must demand it of him. — Peter Drucker

Salvation by society failed the most where it promised the most, in the communist countries. But it also failed in the West. Practically no government program enacted since the 1950s in the Western world - or in the communist countries - has been successful. — Peter Drucker

Ideas are like frog eggs: you've got to lay a thousand to hatch one. — Peter Drucker

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it. — Peter Drucker

Management has authority only as long as it performs. — Peter Drucker

For new technology to replace old, it has to have at least ten times the benefit. — Peter Drucker

One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done. — Peter Drucker

You can't manage what you don't measure. — Peter Drucker

You can't manage knowledge.Knowledge is between two ears and only between two ears. — Peter Drucker

Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization. — Peter Drucker

The world economy is not yet a community
not even an economic community ... Yet the existence of the "global shopping center" is a fact that cannot be undone. The vision of an economy for all will not be forgotten again. — Peter Drucker

If a business is to be considered a continuous process, instead of a series of disjointed stop-and-go events, then the economic universe in which a business operates-and all the major events within it-must have rhyme, rhythm, or reason. — Peter Drucker

If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the "bourgeois" under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource. — Peter Drucker

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. — Peter Drucker

Objectives are not commands; they are commitments. — Peter Drucker

It's more important to do the right thing than to do things right. — Peter Drucker

There is the general belief that the corporation income tax is a tax on the "rich" and on the "fat cats." But with pension funds owning 30% of American large business-and soon to own 50%-the corporation income tax, in effect, eases the load on those in top income brackets and penalizes the beneficiaries of pension funds. — Peter Drucker

Leadership is all about getting results. — Peter Drucker

Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity that causes it, this is therefore the best-indeed the only truly good-solution. — Peter Drucker

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done. — Peter Drucker

People who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs. — Peter Drucker

Once the facts are clear the decisions jump out at you. — Peter Drucker

Tomorrow everybody - or practically everybody - will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man. — Peter Drucker

Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive. — Peter Drucker

A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths. — Peter Drucker

Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything. — Peter Drucker

Success? Odd as it seems, you will achieve the greates results in business and career if you drop the word 'achievement' from your vocabulary and replace it with 'contribution'. — Peter Drucker

Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese. — Peter Drucker

The great mystery isn't that people do things badly but that they occasionally do a few things well. The only thing that is universal is incompetence. Strength is always specific! Nobody ever commented, for example, that the great violinist Jascha Heifetz probably couldn't play the trumpet very well. — Peter Drucker

What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter. — Peter Drucker

I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information. — Peter Drucker

Knowledge applied is productivity. — Peter Drucker

As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it. — Peter Drucker

Mother Teresa's numerical results were not her greatest contribution. Instead, she made the world-and especially India-conscious of compassion. — Peter Drucker

Never mind your happiness; do your duty. — Peter Drucker

Communication always makes demands. It always demands that the recipient become somebody, do something, believe something. It always appeals to motivation. — Peter Drucker

Management is not being brilliant. Management is being conscientious. — Peter Drucker

Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past. — Peter Drucker

The 1st question the effective decision-maker asks is: 'Is this a generic situation or an exception?' — Peter Drucker

The only real difference between one organization and another is the performance of its people. — Peter Drucker

The largest 100 corporations hold 25 percent of the worldwide productive assets, which in turn control 75 percent of international trade and 98 percent of all foreign direct investment.The multinational corporation ... puts the economic decision beyond the effective reach of the political process and its decision-makers, national governments. — Peter Drucker

Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity — Peter Drucker

The leader sees leadership as responsibility rather than as rank and privilege. — Peter Drucker

When it rains manna from heaven, some people put up an umbrella. Others reach for a big spoon. — Peter Drucker

Trees die from the top. No one should ever become a strategist unless he or she is willing to have his or her character serve as a model for subordinates — Peter Drucker

In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise. — Peter Drucker