Peter Drucker Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

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
The corporation is the "master", the employee is the "servant". Because the corporation owns the means of production without which the employee could not make a living, the employee needs the corporation more than vice versa.

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
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
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
And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.

Peter Drucker
Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker
The moment people talk of "implementing" instead of "doing," and of "finalizing" instead of "finishing," the organization is already running a fever.

Peter Drucker
There is an unbroken chain of opposition to the introduction of economic freedom and to the capitalist autonomy of the economic sphere... In every case the opposition could only be overcome - peacefully or by force - because of the promise of capitalism to establish equality... That this promise was an illusion we all know.

Peter Drucker
The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.

Peter Drucker
Schools will change more in the next 30 years than they have since the invention of the printed book.

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

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

Peter Drucker
Knowing Yourself... We also seldom know what gifts we are not endowed with. We will have to learn where we belong, what we have to learn to get the full benefit from our strengths, where our weaknesses lie, what our values are. We also have to know ourselves temperamentally: "Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? What am I committed to? And what is my contribution?"

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
With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe.

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
No other area offers richer opportunities for successful innovation than the unexpected success.

Peter Drucker
What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady and continuous.

Peter Drucker
The Pertinent Question is NOT how to do things right - but how to find the right things to do, and to concentrate resources and efforts on them.

Peter Drucker
Through systematic terror, through indoctrination, through systematic manipulation of stimulus, reward, and punishment, we can today break man and convert him into brute animal... The first step toward survival is therefore to make government legitimate again by attempting to deprive it of these powers... by international action to ban such powers.

Peter Drucker
Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution.

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

Peter Drucker
Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management.

Peter Drucker
A tool is not necessarily better because it is bigger. A tool is best if it does the job required with a minimum of effort, with a minimum of complexity, and with a minimum of power.

Peter Drucker
- A manager sets objectives - A manager organizes - A manager motivates and communicates - A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures - A manager develops people.

Peter Drucker
A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.

Peter Drucker
The individual needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of his Creator and subject to Him.

Peter Drucker
I would hope that American managers - indeed, managers worldwide - continue to appreciate what I have been saying almost from day one: that management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege, that it is much more than "making deals." Management affects people and their lives.

Peter Drucker
Unless we realize that the essence of Nazism is also an attempt to solve a universal problem of Western civilization - that of the industrial society - and that the basic principles on which the Nazis base this attempt are also in no way confined to Germany, we do not know what we fight for or what we fight against... The war is being fought for the structure of industrial society—its basic principles, its purposes, and its institutions.

Peter Drucker