Peter Drucker

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

Peter Drucker

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

Peter Drucker

Dealmaking beats working. That’s why there are deals that make no sense.

Peter Drucker

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.

Peter Drucker

Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.

Peter Drucker

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

Peter Drucker

The first – and usually the best – opportunity for successful change is to exploit one’s own successes and build on them. Problems cannot be ignored. And serious problems have to be taken care of. But to be change leaders, enterprises have to focus on opportunities. They have to starve problems and feed opportunities.

Peter Drucker

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.

Peter Drucker

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

Peter Drucker

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

Peter Drucker

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

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, that’s another matter.

Peter Drucker

People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

Peter Drucker

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes… but no plans.

Peter Drucker

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

Peter Drucker

The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.

Peter Drucker

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

Peter Drucker

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

Peter Drucker

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Peter Drucker

Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.

Peter Drucker

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

Peter Drucker

Business, that’s easily defined – it’s other people’s money.

Peter Drucker

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

Peter Drucker

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

Peter Drucker

A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

Peter Drucker

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

Peter Drucker

Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.

Peter Drucker

It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.

Peter Drucker

Never mind your happiness; do your duty.

Peter Drucker

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

Peter Drucker

My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.

Peter Drucker

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.

Peter Drucker

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.

Peter Drucker

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.

Peter Drucker

The better a man is the more mistakes he will make for the more things he will try.

Peter Drucker

The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.

Peter Drucker

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.”

Peter Drucker

The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.

Peter Drucker

Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.

Peter Drucker

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.

Peter Drucker

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.

Peter Drucker

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

Peter Drucker

The computer is a moron.

Peter Drucker

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.

Peter Drucker

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.

Peter Drucker

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.

Peter Drucker

The new information technology… Internet and e-mail… have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

Peter Drucker

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

Peter Drucker

There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.

Peter Drucker

Performing organisations enjoy what they’re doing.

Peter Drucker

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

Peter Drucker

Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.

Peter Drucker

Concentration is the key to economic results. No other principles of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration.

Peter Drucker

Decision making is the specific executive task.

Peter Drucker

Those who perform love what they’re doing. I’m not saying they like everything they do…..Pianists have a wonderful expression I heard many years ago: “I practice until I have my life in my fingers.”

Peter Drucker

The same is true of people I have seen in business who enjoy the work. Their routine is: it’s got to be done, and I enjoy it because I enjoy the work.

Peter Drucker

Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.

Peter Drucker

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

Peter Drucker

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.

Peter Drucker

Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

Peter Drucker

Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.

Peter Drucker

The task of an executive is not to change human beings. Rather as the Bible tells us in the parable of the talents, the task is to multiply the performance capacity of the whole by putting to use whatever strength, whatever health, whatever aspiration there is in individuals.

Peter Drucker

A man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths. The man who always knows what people cannot do, but never sees what they can do, will undermine the spirit of the organisation. Of course, a manager should have a clear grasp of the limitations of his people, but he should see these as limitations on what they can do, and as a challenge to them to do better.

Peter Drucker

All one has to do is to learn to say “no” if an activity contributes nothing.

Peter Drucker

Use feedback analysis to identify your strengths. Then go to work on improving your strengths. Identify and eliminate bad habits that hinder the full development of your strengths. Figure out what you should do and do it. Finally, decide what you should not do.

Peter Drucker

Know your strengths. Apply them to areas in your organisation where you can make a contribution. Make sure your values and the values of the organisation are compatible.

Peter Drucker

Any organisation develops people; it either forms them or deforms them.

Peter Drucker

Develop your people. Focus on their strengths. Then make high demands based on a person’s strengths. Finally, periodically view their performance.

Peter Drucker

What do we know about developing people? Quite a bit, We certainly know what not to do. First, one does not try to build upon people’s weaknesses.

Peter Drucker

I’m always asked how I know what kind of organisation to accept as a client. When you walk through the door, you know in two minutes whether they enjoy it. And if they don’t enjoy it, then I’d rather not work for them. But if they like it and they feel tomorrow is going to be better – that creates a totally different climate.

Peter Drucker

In what area would excellence really have an extraordinary impact on the economic results of our business, to the point where it might transform the economic performance of the entire business?

Peter Drucker

Leadership is not magnetic personality–that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not making friends and influencing people –that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

Peter Drucker