Peter Drucker
The relevant question is not simply what shall we do tomorrow, but rather what shall we do today in order to get ready for tomorrow.Collection: Order
What gets measured gets managed.Collection: Business
Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself - not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.Collection: Deep Understanding
There is nothing worse than doing the wrong thing well.Collection: Wells
The only skill that will be important in the 21st century is the skill of learning new skills.Everythi ng else will become obsolete over time.Collection: Skills
The most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question.Collection: Mistake
If you have more than five goals, you have none.Collection: Goal
Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.Collection: Organization
The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.Collection: Leadership
Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.Collection: Business
The critical question is not "How can I achieve?" but "What can I contribute?"Collection: Achieve
The key to greatness is to look for people's potential and spend time developing it.Collection: Greatness
Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.Collection: Time
The purpose of information is not knowledge. It is being able to take the right action.Collection: Purpose
Listening (the first competence of leadership) is not a skill, it is a discipline. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.Collection: Skills
Do what you do best, and outsource the rest.Collection: Humor
The large organization has to learn to innovate, or it won't survive.Collection: Organization
The more successful the unit, the more difficult it is to make sure that the large company doesn't put the same expectations on it as it does for the rest of the company. When it's a new venture, whether it's outside or inside the business, it's a child. And you don't put a 40-pound pack on a 6-year-old's back when you take her hiking.Collection: Children
They wrongly believe that good intentions move mountains. Bulldozers move mountains. But there are exceptions.Collection: Believe
Mother Teresa's numerical results were not her greatest contribution. Instead, she made the world-and especially India-conscious of compassion.Collection: Mother
"The area in which the executive first encounters the challenge of strength is in staffing. The effective executive fills positions and promotes on the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to minimize weaknesses but to maximize strength."Collection: Men
The Pertinent Question is NOT how to do things right - but how to find the right things to do, and to concentrate resources and efforts on them.Collection: Motivational
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.Collection: Exercise
Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people -- and allow people to place themselves -- according to their strengths.Collection: Jobs
Managers are agents of transformation, converting the workforce in developed countries from one of manual workers to one of highly educated knowledge workers.Collection: Country
It is commonly believed that innovations create changes - but few ever do. Successful innovations exploit changes that have already happened.Collection: Successful
Thus, for those who are willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovation opportunity.Collection: Opportunity
Promotion should not be more important than accomplishment, or avoiding instability more important than taking the right risk.Collection: Accomplishment
The dilemma of modern society: the conflict between the need for capital formation at a high rate and the popular condemnation of interest and dividends as "unearned income" and "capitalist," if not as sinful and wicked.Collection: Wicked
An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.Collection: Creativity
A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.Collection: May
If a manager spends more than 10 percent of his time on "human relations" the group is probably too large.Collection: Groups
...because knowledge rapidly deteriorates unless it is used constantly, maintaining within an organization an activity that is used only intermittently guarantees incompetence.Collection: Organization
Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution.Collection: Management
An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.Collection: Realist
Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.Collection: Entrepreneur
[Entrepreneurship] is by no means hunch or gamble. But it also is not precisely science. Rather, it is judgment.Collection: Mean
Financial "synergy" is a will-o'-the-wisp.It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice.Collection: Practice
There is the general belief that the corporation income tax is a tax on the "rich" and on the "fat cats." But with pension funds owning 30% of American large business-and soon to own 50%-the corporation income tax, in effect, eases the load on those in top income brackets and penalizes the beneficiaries of pension funds.Collection: Wisdom
Great wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.Collection: Data
Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.Collection: Growth
Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.Collection: Behavior
To arrive at the definition of the problem he must begin by finding the 'critical factor'. This is the element (or elements) in the situation that has to be changed before anything else can be changed, moved, acted upon.Collection: Change
Yet there is nothing more dangerous than to be premature in exploiting a change in perception.Collection: Perception
Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.Collection: Time
There are companies that are good at improving what they're already doing. There are companies that are good at extending what they're doing. And finally there are companies that are good at innovation. Every large company has to be able to do all three - improve, extend, and innovate - simultaneously.Collection: Innovation
The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. She therefore makes sure she puts into the leadership position, into the standard-setting, the performance-making position the person who has the strength to do the outstanding pacesetting job. This always requires focus on the one strength of a person and dismissal of weaknesses as irrelevant unless they hamper the full deployment of the available strength.Collection: Leadership
All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.Collection: Community