Peter Drucker - Performance Quotes

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Keep the boss aware. Bosses, after all, are held responsible by their own bosses for the performance of their subordinates. They must be able to say: "I know what Anne [or John] is trying to do."

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

Peter Drucker
You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths.

Peter Drucker
A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.

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
A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

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
Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the 'naturals,' the ones who somehow know how to teach.

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

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
An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance... Any attempt to go beyond that is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no "loyalty," he owes no "love" and no "attitudes"—he owes performance and nothing else..... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.

Peter Drucker
The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves...

Peter Drucker
To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.

Peter Drucker
Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

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
What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?

Peter Drucker