Peter Drucker Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

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

Peter Drucker
The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission.

Peter Drucker
[The masses] … must turn their hopes toward a miracle. In the depths of their despair reason cannot be believed, truth must be false, and lies must be truth. "Higher bread prices," "lower bread prices," "unchanged bread prices" have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread price which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason.

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
Management has authority only as long as it performs.

Peter Drucker
We do not need more laws. No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model.

Peter Drucker
We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

Peter Drucker
This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work... or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work - still abysmally low - will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people.

Peter Drucker
Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.

Peter Drucker
Never underrate the boss! The boss may look illiterate. He may look stupid. But there is no risk at all in overrating a boss. If you underrate him he will bitterly resent it or impute to you the deficiency in brains and knowledge you imputed to him.

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

Peter Drucker
When Henry Ford said, "The customer can have a car in any color as long as it's black," he was not joking.

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
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
There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology, society, economy, and institutions.

Peter Drucker