Peter Drucker - Business Quotes

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[human types needed for top management tasks]... the "thought man" …the "action man" …the "people man" …the "front man" …Yet those four temperaments are almost never found in one person.... The one-man top management job is a major reason why business fail to grow.

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
Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.

Peter Drucker
There is the general belief that the corporation income tax is a tax on the "rich" and on the "fat cats." But with pension funds owning 30% of American large business-and soon to own 50%-the corporation income tax, in effect, eases the load on those in top income brackets and penalizes the beneficiaries of pension funds.

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
The more successful the unit, the more difficult it is to make sure that the large company doesn't put the same expectations on it as it does for the rest of the company. When it's a new venture, whether it's outside or inside the business, it's a child. And you don't put a 40-pound pack on a 6-year-old's back when you take her hiking.

Peter Drucker
The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.

Peter Drucker
The new always looks so puny-so unpromising-next to the reality of the massive, ongoing business.

Peter Drucker
Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business - in demographics, in values, in technology or science - and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.

Peter Drucker
To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.

Peter Drucker
That people even in well paid jobs choose ever earlier retirement is a severe indictment of our organizations — not just business, but government service, the universities. These people don't find their jobs interesting.

Peter Drucker
The subordinate's job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual.

Peter Drucker
"Value added" is a meaningless concept for a retail business, for a bank, for a life insurance company, and for any other business which is not primarily engaged in manufacturing.

Peter Drucker
Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are a means to mobilize resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.

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

Peter Drucker
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
Some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I've worked with over a sixty-five-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses.

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

Peter Drucker
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
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
One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work. That is why there is an enormous surge in the number of unpaid staff, volunteers. The needs are not going to go away. Business is not going to take up the slack, and government cannot.

Peter Drucker
Growth as a goal, to repeat, is delusion. William James, the American philosopher, talked of the "bitch goddess success." A philosopher of business today might well talk of the "bitch goddess growth."

Peter Drucker
The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives.

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

Peter Drucker
There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.

Peter Drucker