2 Authors

Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker
American Economist

Pamela Druckerman

Pamela Druckerman
American Journalist

Drucker quotes

265 Sourced quotes

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.

If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total depression.

Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.

No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.

The corporation is the "master", the employee is the "servant". Because the corporation owns the means of production without which the employee could not make a living, the employee needs the corporation more than vice versa.

Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined.

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.

Søren Kierkegaard has another answer: human existence is possible as existence not in despair, as existence not in tragedy; it is possible as existence in faith... Faith is the belief that in God the impossible is possible, that in Him time and eternity are one, that both life and death are meaningful.

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.

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

Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity that causes it, this is therefore the best-indeed the only truly good-solution.

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.

Trees die from the top. No one should ever become a strategist unless he or she is willing to have his or her character serve as a model for subordinates

A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done.

Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change

An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.

Financial "synergy" is a will-o'-the-wisp. It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice.

If something fails despite being carefully planned, carefully designed, and conscientiously executed, that failure often bespeaks underlying change and, with it, opportunity.

Entrepreneurship is risky mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.

There are usually half a dozen right answers to what needs to be
done. Yet, unless a person makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing.

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

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

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

What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or a service does for the customer.

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.