Peter Drucker Quotes

Never mind your happiness; do your duty.

— Peter Drucker

“To make a living is no longer enough. Work also has to make a life.”

— Peter Drucker

“Culture eats Christianity for breakfast.”

— Peter Drucker

“The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”

— 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

“All good strategy eventually degenerates into work.”

— Peter Drucker

The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.

— Peter Drucker

“The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.”

— Peter Drucker

Don't try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present!

— Peter Drucker

“Nobody can predict the future; the idea is to have a firm grasp of the present.”

— Peter Drucker

We can't make people better by trying to eliminate their weaknesses, but we can help then perform better by building on their strengths.

— Peter Drucker

“Leadership is more doing than dash.”

— Peter Drucker

“We have tried to substitute mass for purpose. We have tried to regain military potency of defense by making it gigantic, unwieldy, complex. It never works.”

— Peter Drucker

“If you have more than five goals, you have none.”

— 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

“The fault is in the system and not in the men.”

— Peter Drucker

“The company is not and must never claim to be home, family, religion, life or fate for the individual. It must never interfere in his private life or his citizenship. He is tied to the company through a voluntary and cancellable employment contract, not through some mystical or indissoluble bond.”

— Peter Drucker

“Succession planning often results in the selection of a weaker representation of yourself.”

— Peter Drucker

Far too much reorganization goes on all the time. Organizitis is like a spastic colon.

— Peter Drucker

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

— Peter Drucker

“It is commonly believed that innovations create changes - but few ever do. Successful innovations exploit changes that have already happened.”

— Peter Drucker

We can ill afford to have activities conducted as "non-profit," that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.

— Peter Drucker

“Keep the boss aware. Bosses, after all, are held responsible by their own bosses for the performance of their subordinates. They must be able to say: I know what Anne [or John] is trying to do.”

— Peter Drucker

The real achiever do one thing at a time.

— Peter Drucker

“As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel.”

— Peter Drucker

“Work is an extension of personality. It is achievement. It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself, measures his worth, and his humanity.”

— Peter Drucker

“Ideas are somewhat like babies
they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, "This is a damn-fool idea." Instead they ask, "What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?”

— 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

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

“Innovative efforts should never report to line managers charged with responsibility for ongoing operations. The new project is an infant and will remain one for the foreseeable future, and infants belong in the nursery. The 'adults', that is, the executives in charge of existing businesses or products will have neither the time nor understanding for the infant.”

— Peter Drucker

“Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes - it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.”

— Peter Drucker

“There's no such thing as knowledge management;
there are only knowledgeable people.
Information only becomes knowledge
in the hands of someone
who knows what to do with it.”

— 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

“Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.”

— 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

“An institution which is financed by a budget - or which enjoys a monopoly which the customer cannot escape - is rewarded for what it deserves rather than what it earns. It is paid for 'good intentions' and 'programs'. It is paid for not alienating important constituents rather than satisfying any one group. It is misdirected by the way it is being paid into defining performance and results as what will produce the budget rather than as what will produce contribution.”

— Peter Drucker

Objectives are not commands; they are commitments.

— Peter Drucker

The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago.

— Peter Drucker

“One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.”

— Peter Drucker

“Strategic planning is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial (risk-taking) decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity; organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions; and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback.”

— Peter Drucker

“History has been written not by the most talented but by the most motivated.”

— Peter Drucker

Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.

— Peter Drucker

“A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant - and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates.”

— Peter Drucker

An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.

— Peter Drucker

“The need to manage oneself is creating a revolution in human affairs.”

— 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

Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.

— Peter Drucker

“Unless strategy evaluation is performed seriously and systematically, and unless strategists are willing to act on the results, energy will be used up defending yesterday.”

— Peter Drucker

“A business enterprise must continue beyond the lifetime of the individual or of the generation to be capable of producing its contributions to economy and to society.”

— Peter Drucker

Entrepreneurs believe that profit is what matters most in a new enterprise. But profit is secondary. Cash flow matters most.

— Peter Drucker