Peter Drucker - Job Quotes

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The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.

Peter Drucker
It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people: a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are told.

Peter Drucker
The person who will make the greatest contribution to a company is the mature person-and you cannot have maturity if you have no life or interest outside the job.

Peter Drucker
Once a year ask the boss, "What do I or my people do that helps you to do your job?" and "What do I or my people do that hampers you?"

Peter Drucker
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
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
[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
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
An organization belongs on a sick list when promotion becomes more important to its people than accomplishment of their job they are in. It is sick when it is more concerned with avoiding mistakes than with taking risks, with counteracting the weaknesses of its members than with building on their strength. But it is sick also when "good human relations" become more important than performance and achievement.

Peter Drucker
Tomorrow everybody - or practically everybody - will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.

Peter Drucker
The fundamental reality for every worker, from sweeper to executive vice-president, is the eight hours or so that he spends on the job. In our society of organizations, it is the job through which the great majority has access to achievement, to fulfillment, and to community.

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
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
In the managerial organization, the top people sit in judgment; in the innovative organization it is their job to encourage ideas, no matter how unripe or crude.

Peter Drucker
Fortunately or unfortunately, the one predictable thing in any organization is the crisis. That always comes. That's when you do depend on the leader: The job of the leader is to build an organization that is battle-ready, that has high morale, that knows how to behave, that trusts itself, and where people trust one another.

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