Peter Drucker Quotes - 56 quotes

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (1909-2005) was a renowned management consultant, educator, and author. He is often referred to as the father of modern management. Drucker’s work laid the philosophical and practical foundations for the modern business corporation and management education. He was born on Nov... show more

 Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.

- Peter Drucker

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 We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad, ...We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order... We see change as being order itself--indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one.

- Peter Drucker

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 ...human beings need community. If there are no communities available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities...

- Peter Drucker

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 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.

- Peter Drucker

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 The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism.

- Peter Drucker

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 Yet the existence of the "global shopping center" is a fact that cannot be undone. The vision of an economy for all will not be forgotten again.

- Peter Drucker

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 The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.

- Peter Drucker

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 It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people: a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are told.

- Peter Drucker

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 It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, ...The enterprise must demand it of him.

- Peter Drucker

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 The company is not and must never claim to be home, family, religion, life or fate for the individual. It must never interfere in his private life or his citizenship. He is tied to the company through a voluntary and cancellable employment contract, not through some mystical or indissoluble bond.

- Peter Drucker

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 Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.

- Peter Drucker

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 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

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 And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.

- Peter Drucker

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 The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it.

- Peter Drucker

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 We do not need more laws. No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model.

- Peter Drucker

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 The worker's effectiveness is determined largely by the way he is being managed.

- Peter Drucker

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 A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.

- Peter Drucker

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

- Peter Drucker

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 Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions.

- Peter Drucker

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 Communication is always "propaganda." The emitter always wants "to get something across."

- Peter Drucker

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 Ideas are somewhat like babies - they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, "This is a damn-fool idea." Instead they ask, "What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?"

- Peter Drucker

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 As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it.

- Peter Drucker

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 This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work... or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work - still abysmally low - will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people.

- Peter Drucker

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 The major incentive to productivity and efficiency are social and moral rather than financial.

- Peter Drucker

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 Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.

- Peter Drucker

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 The days of the 'intuitive' manager are numbered.

- Peter Drucker

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 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

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 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

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 For the social ecologist language is not "communication." It is not just "message." It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communication.

- Peter Drucker

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 ...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

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 Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won't survive. It's as large a change as when we first got the printed book. Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? And for the middle-class family, college education for their children is as much of a necessity as is medical care—without it the kids have no future. Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis.

- Peter Drucker

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

- Peter Drucker

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 Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.

- Peter Drucker

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

- Peter Drucker

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 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

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 A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.

- Peter Drucker

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 The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.

- Peter Drucker

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 [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

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

- Peter Drucker

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 Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations; most computer users have found that they now need more, and more expensive clerks, even though they call them "operators" or "programmers.

- Peter Drucker

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 All economic activity is by definition "high risk." And defending yesterday - that is, not innovating - is far more risky than making tomorrow.

- Peter Drucker

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 One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.

- Peter Drucker

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 "Loafing" is easy, but "leisure" is difficult.

- Peter Drucker

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 A tool is not necessarily better because it is bigger. A tool is best if it does the job required with a minimum of effort, with a minimum of complexity, and with a minimum of power.

- Peter Drucker

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 Management has authority only as long as it performs.

- Peter Drucker

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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

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 I think the educated person of the future is somebody who realizes the need to continue to learn. That is the new definition and it is going to change the world we live in and work in.

- Peter Drucker

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 Engineers speak half–jokingly about Murphy's Law: "If anything can go wrong, it will." But complexity stands under a second law as well. Let me call it Drucker's law: "If one thing goes wrong, everything else will, and at the same time."

- Peter Drucker

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 Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

- Peter Drucker

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 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

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 There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.

- Peter Drucker

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 The days of the 'intuitive' manager are numbered.

- Peter Drucker

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 Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.

- Peter Drucker

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 Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.

- Peter Drucker

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 There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.

- Peter Drucker

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 So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.

- Peter Drucker

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