Peter Drucker
Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works.Collection: Business
The worker's effectiveness is determined largely by the way he is being managed.Collection: Effectiveness
A manager sets objectives - A manager organizes - A manager motivates and communicates - A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures - A manager develops people.Collection: People
Vision without execution is delusion. The joy is in the resultsCollection: Joy
Progress is obtained only by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. When you solve problems, all you do is guarantee a return to normalcy.Collection: Opportunity
Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up.Collection: Growing Up
During periods of discontinuous, abrupt change, the essence of adaptation involves a keen sensitivity to what should be abandoned - not what should be changed or introduced. A willingness to depart from the familiar has distinct survival value.Collection: Motivational
I no longer think that learning how to manage people, especially subordinates, is the most important for executives to learn. I am teaching above all else, how to manage oneself.Collection: Teaching
The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside.The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a satisfied patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise there are only costs.Collection: School
A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant - and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates.Collection: People
It’s up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Jobs
What's measured improvesCollection: Management
One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.Collection: Change
Organizations are no longer built on force, but on trust.Collection: Organization
Success? Odd as it seems, you will achieve the greates results in business and career if you drop the word 'achievement' from your vocabulary and replace it with 'contribution'.Collection: Vocabulary
Every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.Collection: Opportunity
It's more important to do the right thing than to do things right.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Education
You can't manage what you don't measure.Collection: Manage
Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are a means to mobilize resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.Collection: Communication
No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real.Collection: Real
Most organizations staff their problems & starve their opportunities.Collection: Opportunity
People are effective because they say 'no,' because they say, 'this isn't for me.'Collection: People
Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.Collection: Unique
The 1st question the effective decision-maker asks is: 'Is this a generic situation or an exception?'Collection: Decision
What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter.Collection: Motivational
Education gives you neither experience nor wisdom.Collection: Giving
The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives.Collection: Purpose
The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.Collection: Innovation
The most critical case in a corporation, especially a big one, is when everything goes well, when you have accomplished your objectives. When the temptation is to work twice as hard instead of saying, "We have accomplished our objectives, we have to think again."Collection: Business
One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.Collection: Men
The greatest change in corporate culture - and the way business is being conducted - may be the accelerated growth of relationships based... on partnership.Collection: Art
Communication is always "propaganda." The emitter always wants "to get something across."Collection: Communication
The manager who comes up with the right solution to the wrong problem is more dangerous than the manager who comes up with the wrong solution to the right problem.Collection: Problem
The ultimate resource in economic development is people. It is people, not capital or raw materials that develop an economy.Collection: People
To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.Collection: Purpose
There are just two questions to ask to attain success in business: First, "What business am I in?" Second, "How's business?"Collection: Two
There's nothing so useless than executing a task efficiently when it actually never should have been executed at all.Collection: Should Have
The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.Collection: Leader
Do not measure your life by your goals but what you are doing to achieve them.Collection: Motivation
Don't try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present!Collection: Future
Business has only two basic functions - marketing and innovation.Collection: Success
Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.Collection: Distance
Loafing" is easy, but "leisure" is difficult.Collection: Leisure
Never underrate the boss! The boss may look illiterate. He may look stupid. But there is no risk at all in overrating a boss. If you underrate him he will bitterly resent it or impute to you the deficiency in brains and knowledge you imputed to him.Collection: Stupid
Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise.Collection: Resources
Some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I've worked with over a sixty-five-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses.Collection: Strength