Peter Drucker - Organization Quotes

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

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

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
Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.

Peter Drucker
You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers - because without trust, they won't fight.

Peter Drucker
Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work - on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself - it must be organized for constant change.

Peter Drucker
The large organization has to learn to innovate, or it won't survive.

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
Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not bounced.

Peter Drucker
Because knowledge rapidly deteriorates unless it is used constantly, maintaining within an organization an activity that is used only intermittently guarantees incompetence.

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 only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.

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
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
The moment people talk of "implementing" instead of "doing," and of "finalizing" instead of "finishing," the organization is already running a fever.

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
Morale in an organization does not mean that "people get along together"; the test is performance not conformance.

Peter Drucker
The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.

Peter Drucker
Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.

Peter Drucker
We still think and talk of the basic problems of an industrial society as problems that can be solved by changing the system, that is the superstructure of political organization. Yet the real problems lie within the [industrial] enterprise.... our representative institution... a mirror in which we look when we want to see ourselves.

Peter Drucker
Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.

Peter Drucker
The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.

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

Peter Drucker
Human beings need community. If there are no communities available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities... Only the social sector, that is, the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, can create what we now need, communities for citizens... What the dawning 21st century needs above all is equally explosive growth of the nonprofit social sector in building communities in the newly dominant social environment, the city.

Peter Drucker