The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.
—Peter Drucker
There are times to face the fact that the organization as a whole is not performing-that there are weak results everywhere and little prospect of improving. It may be time to merge or liquidate and put your energies somewhere else.
—Peter Drucker
To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Now, Learn, Rest, Will, Knowledge
The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Work
We greatly overestimate what we can accomplish in one year. But we greatly underestimate what we can accomplish in five years.
—Peter Drucker
Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Work
The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Doubt, Business
Do the right things instead of trying to do everything right.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Perfectionism
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
Topics: Knowledge
It’s more important to do the right thing than to do things right.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Integrity
There are an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Stress
Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
—Peter Drucker
Business has only two functions—marketing and innovation.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Business
The computer is a moron.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Computers
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.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Capitalism
Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Innovation
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
Topics: Teamwork
Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Goals, Commitment
What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that’s another matter.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Willpower, Will Power, Will
Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Time
The better a man is the more mistakes he will make for the more things he will try.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Mistakes
Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes … but no plans.
—Peter Drucker
Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.
—Peter Drucker
So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Difficulty, Management
A business exists to create a customer.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Business, Customers
Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Innovation
Don’t try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present!
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Future
The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Results, Action, Knowledge, Focus, Now, Act
Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Quality
If results are our goal, they must also be our test.
—Peter Drucker
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Peter Senge American Management Consultant
- Margaret J. Wheatley American Management Consultant
- Stephen Covey American Self-help Author
- Robin Sharma Canadian Writer, Motivational Speaker
- Tom Peters American Management Consultant
- Bruno Bettelheim Austrian-born Psychoanalyst
- Arnold Schwarzenegger Austrian-American Actor, Politician
- John Kotter American Management Consultant
- Warren Bennis American Management Consultant
- Seth Godin American Entrepreneur
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