Peter Drucker Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent

Peter Drucker
To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

Peter Drucker
The monomaniac is unlikely to succeed. Most leave only their bleached bones in the roadless desert. But the rest of us, with our multiple interests instead of a single mission, are certain to fail and have no impact at all.

Peter Drucker
The ultimate resource in economic development is people. It is people, not capital or raw materials that develop an economy.

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
Business exists to supply goods and services to customers and economic surplus to society, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers or even dividends to shareholders.

Peter Drucker
The only real difference between one organization and another is the performance of its people.

Peter Drucker
When the business grows, the person who founded it is incredibly busy. Rapid growth puts an enormous strain on a business. You outgrow your production facilities. You outgrow your management capabilities.

Peter Drucker
The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today's society.

Peter Drucker
Important decisions are risky. They should be controversial. Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework.

Peter Drucker
The enterprise can fulfill its human and social functions only if it prospers as a business.

Peter Drucker
They wrongly believe that good intentions move mountains. Bulldozers move mountains. But there are exceptions.

Peter Drucker
Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures.

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

Peter Drucker
Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but the test of their validity.

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
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
Unless a decision has degenerated into work, it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.

Peter Drucker
Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.

Peter Drucker
The critical question is not "How can I achieve?" but "What can I contribute?"

Peter Drucker
Every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.

Peter Drucker