Peter Drucker
Don't solve problems. Pursue opportunities.Collection: Opportunity
Shoes are real. Money is an end result.Collection: Real
Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society – and especially in the economy – as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. This is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur.Collection: Years
Teamwork is neither "good" nor "desirable." It is a fact. Wherever people work together or play together they do so as a team. Which team to use for what purpose is a crucial, difficult and risky decision that is even harder to unmake. Managements have yet to learn how to make it.Collection: Teamwork
Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable.Collection: Planning
If "socialism" is defined as "ownership of the means of production"--and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition--then the United States is the first truly Socialist country.Collection: Country
Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.Collection: Thinking
Knowledge is being applied to knowledge itself. It is now fast becoming the one factor in production, sidelining both capital and labour.Collection: Thinking
In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.Collection: Business
Management and union may be likened to that serpent of the fables who on one body had two heads that fighting each other with poisoned fangs, killed themselves.Collection: Fighting
The new always looks so puny-so unpromising-next to the reality of the massive, ongoing business.Collection: Reality
Understanding our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong -- these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of knowledge workers.Collection: Knowing
Information is the manager's main tool, indeed the manager's capital, and it is he who must decide what information he needs and how to use it.Collection: Library
Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior.Collection: Expression
To improve communications, work not on the utter, but the recipient.Collection: Communication
Technology is not about tools, it deals with how Man works.Collection: Technology
As a rule we perceive what we expect to perceive... The unexpected is usually not received at all.Collection: Unexpected
Decisions exist only in the present.Collection: Decision
But innovation is more than a new method. It is a new view of the universe, as one of risk rather than of chance or of certainty. It is a new view of man's role in the universe; he creates order by taking risks. And this means that innovation, rather than being an assertion of human power, is an acceptance of human responsibility.Collection: Change
We will have to learn to lead people rather then to contain them.Collection: People
The subordinate's job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Meaningful
Knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant-and perhaps even the only-source of competitive advantage.Collection: Keys
We always remember best the irrelevant.Collection: Remember
The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.Collection: Facts
As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel.Collection: Business
Our society has become an employee society.Collection: Our Society
A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.Collection: Country
It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, ...The enterprise must demand it of him.Collection: Responsibility
The need to manage oneself is creating a revolution in human affairs.Collection: Creating
Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.Collection: Change
The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is ... to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge workerCollection: Important
Education can no longer be the sole property of the state.Collection: Education
Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese.Collection: Decision
If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the "bourgeois" under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource.Collection: Knights
Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management.Collection: Management
The enterprise, by definition, must be capable of producing more or better than all the resources that comprise it.Collection: Definitions
No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.Collection: Government
Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills - accounting and what have you - but you can't teach them management.Collection: Teaching
Managing innovation will increasingly become a challenge to management, and especially to top management, and a touchstone of its competence.Collection: Top Management
The monomaniac is unlikely to succeed. Most leave only their bleached bones in the roadless desert. But the rest of us, with our multiple interests instead of a single mission, are certain to fail and have no impact at all.Collection: Impact
What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady and continuous.Collection: Entrepreneur
In a rural society communities are "given" for the individual. Community is a fact, whether family or religion, social class or caste.Collection: Class
Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.Collection: Innovation
Keep the boss aware. Bosses, after all, are held responsible by their own bosses for the performance of their subordinates. They must be able to say: "I know what Anne [or John] is trying to do."Collection: Boss
In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for"... On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to [by both] the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration.Collection: Party
Schools will change more in the next 30 years than they have since the invention of the printed book.Collection: Morning
Few relationships are as critical to the business enterprise as the relationship to the government. Managers have responsibility for this relationship as part of their responsibility to the enterprise itself. It is an area of social impact of the business. To a large extent the relationship to government results from what businesses do or fail to do.Collection: Responsibility
[The masses] ... must turn their hopes toward a miracle. In the depths of their despair reason cannot be believed, truth must be false, and lies must be truth. "Higher bread prices," "lower bread prices," "unchanged bread prices" have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread price which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason.Collection: Lying