Peter Drucker famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Motivational #Business

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

#Inspirational #Wise #Peace

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.
-- Peter Drucker

#Love #Inspirational #Life

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
-- Peter Drucker

#Inspirational #Change #Leadership

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
-- Peter Drucker

#Inspirational #Success #Confidence

Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.
-- Peter Drucker

#Wise #Business #Goal

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

#Inspirational #Leadership #Basketball

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

#Work #Future #Entrepreneur

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.
-- Peter Drucker

#Motivational #Leadership #Business

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

#Lunch #Mba #Decision

Knowledge is power. In post-capitalism, power comes from transmitting information to make it productive, not hiding it.
-- Peter Drucker

#Communication #Information #Hiding

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

#Communication #Important #Cocktails

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old
-- Peter Drucker

#Inspiring #Business #Creativity

Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.
-- Peter Drucker

#Leadership #Organization #Doe

What gets measured gets managed.
-- Peter Drucker

#Clever

Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.
-- Peter Drucker

#Art #Practice #Entrepreneurship

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

#Motivation #Book #Writing

Leadership is defined by results not attributes.
-- Peter Drucker

#Leadership #Results #Attributes

People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.
-- Peter Drucker

#Leadership #Organization #People

Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined.
-- Peter Drucker

#Education #Men #Innovation

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

#Inspirational #Leadership #Mistake

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.
-- Peter Drucker

#Leadership #Teamwork #Jobs

We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.
-- Peter Drucker

#Information #Economy #Born

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

#Business #Power #Information

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

#Inspirational #Encouraging #Wise

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

#Leadership #Wise #Funny Inspirational

If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
-- Peter Drucker

#Effectiveness #Focus #Secret

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.
-- Peter Drucker

#Excellence #Enemy #Adequacy

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

#Successful #Opportunity #Careers

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

#Thinking #Selling #Company

Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.
-- Peter Drucker

#Leadership #Jobs #Firsts

There are two types of people in the business community: those who produce results and those who give you reasons why they didn't.
-- Peter Drucker

#Two #Giving #People

What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?
-- Peter Drucker

#Institutions #Results #Performances

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

#Change #Teacher #Educational

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the 'naturals,' the ones who somehow know how to teach.
-- Peter Drucker

#Teacher #Retirement #Teaching

There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.
-- Peter Drucker

#Inspirational #Risk

The most effective way to manage change is to create it.
-- Peter Drucker

#Inspirational #Change #Way

Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.
-- Peter Drucker

#Time #Manage

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
-- Peter Drucker

#Motivational #Business #Purpose

Culture eats strategy for breakfast,
-- Peter Drucker

#Culture #Breakfast #Strategy

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.
-- Peter Drucker

#Economy #Values

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

#Business #Communication #Technology

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.
-- Peter Drucker

#Art #Execution #Commodity

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

#Inspirational #Wise #Innovation

The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.
-- Peter Drucker

#Mean #Information #Action

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

#Success #Attention #Persons

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

#Thinking #Breathing #Games

During periods of discontinuous, abrupt change, the essence of adaptation involves a keen sensitivity to what should be abandoned - not what should be changed or introduced. A willingness to depart from the familiar has distinct survival value.
-- Peter Drucker

#Motivational #Essence #Survival

Innovation opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.
-- Peter Drucker

#Opportunity #Innovation #Tempest

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

#Future #Trying

You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.
-- Peter Drucker

#Positive Thinking #Miracle #Action

We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don't spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop
-- Peter Drucker

#Teaching #Leader #Half

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out.
-- Peter Drucker

#Smart #Ambition #Opportunity

It’s up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.
-- Peter Drucker

#Years #May #Productive

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation.
-- Peter Drucker

#Success #Stress #Mean

Every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise
-- Peter Drucker

#Opportunity #Issues #Social

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

#Educational #Quality #Clients

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.
-- Peter Drucker

#Wall #Educational #Important

In areas where they are simply incompetent, smart executives don’t make decisions or take actions. They delegate.
-- Peter Drucker

#Smart #Decision #Action

The key to greatness is to look for people's potential and spend time developing it.
-- Peter Drucker

#Greatness #Keys #People

The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.
-- Peter Drucker

#Leader #Followers #Definitions

No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility.
-- Peter Drucker

#Responsibility #Decision #Steps

To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.
-- Peter Drucker

#Knowledge #Tree #Forests

Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.
-- Peter Drucker

#Giving #Quality #Pay

Leaders shouldn?t attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can?t compromise.
-- Peter Drucker

#Ideas #Leader #Moral

Production is not the application of tools to materials, but logic to work.
-- Peter Drucker

#Tools #Logic #Materials

The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.
-- Peter Drucker

#Knowing #People #Life Is

The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try.
-- Peter Drucker

#Mistake #Failure #Men

Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.
-- Peter Drucker

#Organization #Confusion #Three

Business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.
-- Peter Drucker

#Business #Frustration #Important

Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.
-- Peter Drucker

#Distance #Classroom #Campus

Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.
-- Peter Drucker

#Important #Right Thing #Doing The Right Thing

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

#Organization #Symptoms #Meetings

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two and only two functions: Marketing and Innovation. Marketing and Innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.
-- Peter Drucker

#Two #Innovation #Marketing

An effective executive builds on strengths - their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates, and on the strength of the situation.
-- Peter Drucker

#Situation #Colleagues #Executives

Erroneous assumptions can be disastrous.
-- Peter Drucker

#Thinking #Assumption

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

#Integrity #Important #Right Thing

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

#Moving #Excellence #Doe

One cannot buy, rent or hire more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it. 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. All work takes place in, and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource.
-- Peter Drucker

#Time #Unique #Yesterday

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

#Organization #Friction #Disorder

Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.
-- Peter Drucker

#Believe #Giving #Quality

The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.
-- Peter Drucker

#Past #Leader #Inspire

Great wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.
-- Peter Drucker

#Data #Marketing #Action

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.
-- Peter Drucker

#Marketing #Selling #Aim

Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.
-- Peter Drucker

#Answers #Looks #Blank

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

#Country #Business #Future

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

#Expectations #Clerks #Needs

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

#Decision #Choices #Facts

One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.
-- Peter Drucker

#Men #Hands

Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.
-- Peter Drucker

#Appreciation #Business #Opportunity

No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.
-- Peter Drucker

#Inspirational #Teach #Subjects

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service.
-- Peter Drucker

#Mean #Opportunity #Entrepreneur

Marketing is not a function, it is the whole business seen from the customer's point of view.
-- Peter Drucker

#Business #Views #Marketing

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

#Business #Data #Information

The computer is a moron.
-- Peter Drucker

#Work #Technology #Intellectual

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

#Strength #Wise #Expectations

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

#Work #Knowledge #Learning

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

#Leadership #Wise #Responsibility

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

#Asking Questions #Ignorant #Economy

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

#Education #Wise #Knowledge