Peter Drucker
Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.Collection: Wrong Answers
Conductors do not know how the oboe does its work, but they know what the oboe should contribute.Collection: Doe
Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.Collection: Care
Results is all that separates one company from another.Collection: Results
Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.Collection: Cancer
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.Collection: Class
What managers decide to stop doing is often more important than what they decide to do.Collection: Important
Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.Collection: Leadership
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.Collection: Horse
We do not need more laws . No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model .Collection: Country
The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.Collection: Inspirational
Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are manual labor.Collection: Balance
Human beings need community. If there are no communities available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities... Only the social sector, that is, the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, can create what we now need, communities for citizens... What the dawning 21st century needs above all is equally explosive growth of the nonprofit social sector in building communities in the newly dominant social environment, the city.Collection: Cities
Once a year ask the boss, "What do I or my people do that helps you to do your job?" and "What do I or my people do that hampers you?"Collection: Jobs
"Plastic moments" are those periods that overlap when the old has gone but the new has not yet arrived and when the course of history is more open to being shaped and steered than any other time.Collection: Gone
The productivity of people requires continuous learning, as the Japanese have taught us. It requires adoption in the West of the specific Japanese Zen concept where one learns to do better what one already does well.Collection: Taught Us
I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information.Collection: Believe
Objectives are not commands; they are commitments.Collection: Commitment
The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes...otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.Collection: Jobs
One does not start with facts. One starts with opinions.Collection: Doe
As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it.Collection: Understanding
The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle age, soured, cynical, unproductive.Collection: Jobs
Entrepreneurs believe that profit is what matters most in a new enterprise. But profit is secondary. Cash flow matters most.Collection: Believe
The most probable assumption is that no currently working 'business theory' will be valid 10 years hence.Collection: Years
An organization which just perpetuates today's level of vision, excellence, and accomplishment has lost the capacity to adapt.Collection: Organization
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.Collection: Success
Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Cynical
Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.Collection: Innovation
Every first-rate editor I have ever heard of reads, edits and rewrites every word that goes into his publication.... Good editors are not 'permissive'; they do not let their colleagues do 'their thing'; they make sure that everybody does the 'paper's thing.' A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done.Collection: Writing
Business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.Collection: Purpose
A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.Collection: Men
History has been written not by the most talented but by the most motivated.Collection: Motivated
Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.Collection: Organization
If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.Collection: Effectiveness
Focus on opportunities, not problems.Collection: Opportunity
Mission defines strategy, and strategy defines structure.Collection: Strategy
Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two - and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are 'costs'.Collection: Two
Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person - hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre - into an outstanding performer.Collection: Successful
Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.Collection: Art
The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system's weaknesses irrelevant.Collection: Strong
The only real difference between one organization and another is the performance of its people.Collection: Real
Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.Collection: Inspirational
The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things.Collection: Organization
An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance... Any attempt to go beyond that is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no "loyalty," he owes no "love" and no "attitudes" - he owes performance and nothing else. .... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.Collection: Loyalty
If you want to improve how you manage time - stop doing what doesn't need to be done!Collection: Priorities
One cannot buy, rent or hire more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it. Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time. All work takes place in, and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource.Collection: Time
Knowledge is the source of Wealth. Applied to tasks we already know, it becomes Productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes Innovation.Collection: Knowledge