Peter Drucker - Management Quotes

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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
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
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 most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question.

Peter Drucker
Management and union may be likened to that serpent of the fables who on one body had two heads that fighting each other with poisoned fangs, killed themselves.

Peter Drucker
Management and entrepreneurship are only two different dimensions of the same task. An entrepreneur who does not learn how to manage will not last long. A management that does not learn to innovate will not last long.

Peter Drucker
Management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.

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

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

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

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
The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the MANUAL WORKER in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.

Peter Drucker
Management has authority only as long as it performs.

Peter Drucker
It has been said, and only half in jest, that a tough, professionally led union is a great force for improving management performance. It forces the manager to think about what he is doing and to be able to explain his actions and behavior.

Peter Drucker
Teamwork is neither "good" nor "desirable." It is a fact. Wherever people work together or play together they do so as a team. Which team to use for what purpose is a crucial, difficult and risky decision that is even harder to unmake. Managements have yet to learn how to make it.

Peter Drucker
Managing innovation will increasingly become a challenge to management, and especially to top management, and a touchstone of its competence.

Peter Drucker
... what's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There is no excuse for it. No justification. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we will pay a heavy price for it.

Peter Drucker
Every organization of today has to build into its very structure the management of change.

Peter Drucker
A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.

Peter Drucker
Top management as a function and as a structure was first developed by Georg Siemens (1839-1901) in Germany between 1870 and 1880, when he designed and built the Deutsche Bank and made it, within a very few years, into continental Europe's leading and most dynamic financial institution.

Peter Drucker
Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.

Peter Drucker
The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

Peter Drucker