Peter Drucker
Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to changeCollection: Leader
By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.Collection: Integrity
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.Collection: Jobs
The final test of greatness in a CEO is how well he chooses a successor and whether he can step aside and let the successor run the company.Collection: Running
Through systematic terror, through indoctrination, through systematic manipulation of stimulus, reward, and punishment, we can today break man and convert him into brute animal... The first step toward survival is therefore to make government legitimate again by attempting to deprive it of these powers... by international action to ban such powers.Collection: Animal
In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise.Collection: Book
A fundamental responsibility of leadership is make sure that everybody knows the mission, understands it, lives it.Collection: Responsibility
The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.Collection: Race
I have no interest in celebrities. If all the superrich disappeared, the world economy would not even notice. The superrich are irrelevant to the economy.Collection: World
Too many leaders try to do a little bit of 25 things and get nothing done. They are very popular because they always say yes. But they get nothing done.Collection: Leader
Far too much reorganization goes on all the time. Organizitis is like a spastic colon.Collection: Reorganization
The Welfare State, which begun in Imperial Germany for the truly indigent and disabled, has now become "everybody's entitlement" and an increasing burden on those who produce.Collection: Germany
Leaders shouldn?t attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can?t compromise.Collection: Ideas
The best plan is only a plan... unless it degerates into work.Collection: Plans
In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.Collection: Learning
The healthier a new venture and the faster it grows, the more financial feeding it requires.Collection: New Ventures
If you want it, measure it. If you can't measure it, forget it.Collection: Leadership
The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.Collection: Years
The postwar [WWII] GI Bill of Rights - and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans - signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century. We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world.Collection: Rights
If a government commission had worked on the horse, you would have the first horse that could operate its knee joint in both directions. The trouble is it couldn't have stood up.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Art
All companies are service companies; some also manufacture products.Collection: Company
We have tried to substitute mass for purpose. We have tried to regain military potency of defense by making it gigantic, unwieldy, complex. It never works.Collection: Military
The world economy is not yet a community--not even an economic community...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.Collection: Shopping
True marketing starts...with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?" It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"Collection: Reality
The race for Quality has no finish line - so technically, it's more like a death march. Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.Collection: Race
Trust is congruence between what you say and what you do.Collection: Congruence
What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can't be very good.Collection: Believe
Salvation by society failed the most where it promised the most, in the communist countries. But it also failed in the West. Practically no government program enacted since the 1950s in the Western world - or in the communist countries - has been successful.Collection: Country
Although he reputedly hated the label of 'guru', Peter Drucker was, by any standards, the greatest management guru the world has yet seen. In 1996, the McKinsey Quarterly journal described him as the 'the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow' and Robert Heller described him as 'the greatest man in the history of management', praise indeed for a man who described himself as 'just an old journalist'.Collection: Men
The great mystery isn't that people do things badly but that they occasionally do a few things well. The only thing that is universal is incompetence. Strength is always specific! Nobody ever commented, for example, that the great violinist Jascha Heifetz probably couldn't play the trumpet very well.Collection: Play
Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.Collection: Inspiring
No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary people perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each person's strength to help all the other members perform.Collection: Strength
Successful people know they need to get many things done-and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate their time and energy on doing one thing at a time-and on doing first things firs.Collection: Successful
To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.Collection: Numbers
A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.Collection: Weakness
Unless we realize that the essence of Nazism is also an attempt to solve a universal problem of Western civilization - that of the industrial society - and that the basic principles on which the Nazis base this attempt are also in no way confined to Germany, we do not know what we fight for or what we fight against... The war is being fought for the structure of industrial society - its basic principles, its purposes, and its institutions.Collection: War
Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order... catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society.Collection: Spiritual