Peter Drucker
The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.Collection: Needs
In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.Collection: Teaching
Ideas are somewhat like babies - they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, "This is a damn-fool idea." Instead they ask, "What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?"Collection: Baby
Innovative efforts should never report to line managers charged with responsibility for ongoing operations. The new project is an infant and will remain one for the foreseeable future, and infants belong in the nursery. The 'adults', that is, the executives in charge of existing businesses or products will have neither the time nor understanding for the infant.Collection: Team
What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.Collection: Effectiveness
Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.Collection: People
If you want to predict the future create it.Collection: Want
Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything.Collection: Hard Times
The greatest challenge to organizations is the balance between continuity and change. You need both. At different times, the balance is slightly more over here, or slightly more over there, but you need both. And balance is basically the greatest task in leadership. Organizations have to have continuity, and yet if there is not enough new challenge, not enough change, they become empty bureaucracies, awfully fast.Collection: Business
The organization is, above all, social. It is people.Collection: Organization
To make the future demands courage. It demands work. But it also demands faith.Collection: Goal
To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.Collection: Order
Every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise.Collection: Opportunity
Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.Collection: Procrastination
No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.Collection: Inspirational
Do the right things instead of trying to do everything right.Collection: Work
More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.Collection: Business
To succeed in this new world, we will have to learn, first, who we are. Few people, even highly successful people, can answer the questions, Do you know what you're good at? Do you know what you need to learn so that you get the full benefit of your strengths? Few have even asked themselves these questions.Collection: Knowledge
The person who will make the greatest contribution to a company is the mature person-and you cannot have maturity if you have no life or interest outside the job.Collection: Leadership
Replace your pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution.Collection: Pursuit
Listening is not a skill; it is a discipline.Collection: Skills
The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.Collection: Marketing
Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.Collection: Inspirational
Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.Collection: Needs
Communication always makes demands. It always demands that the recipient become somebody, do something, believe something. It always appeals to motivation.Collection: Motivation
Nobody can predict the future; the idea is to have a firm grasp of the present.Collection: Ideas
The largest 100 corporations hold 25 percent of the worldwide productive assets, which in turn control 75 percent of international trade and 98 percent of all foreign direct investment.The multinational corporation...puts the economic decision beyond the effective reach of the political process and its decision-makers, national governments.Collection: Government
Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability and to prevent, or at least slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work - on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself - it must be organized for constant change.Collection: Change
The strength of the computer lies in its being a logic machine. It does precisely what it is programed to do. This makes it fast and precise. It also makes it a total moron; for logic is essentially stupid.Collection: Lying
The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago.Collection: Eight
What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?Collection: Results
Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.Collection: Reform
You can't manage knowledge.Knowledge is between two ears and only between two ears.Collection: Learning
Unless a decision has degenerated into work, it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.Collection: Decision
We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.Collection: Motivational
In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers , is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power.Collection: Corporations
Decisions of the kind the executive has to make are not made well by acclamation. They are made well only if based on the clash of conflicting views...The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.Collection: Views
Business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.Collection: Business
The real achiever do one thing at a time.Collection: Real
Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.Collection: Elephants
Knowledge has become the key resource of the world economy.Collection: Keys
People alone of all the resources can grow and develop.Collection: People
I'm a writer. I could not or would not ever run a business. I don't even have a secretary. And contrary to some of the stereotypes, entrepreneurs are not loners. I am.Collection: Running
The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today's society.Collection: Business
As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.Collection: Moving
What's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There's no excuse for it. No justification. No explanation. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we'll pay a very nasty price.Collection: Top Management
The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.Collection: Knowledge Workers
Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.Collection: Business
The better a man is the more mistakes will he make – for the more new things he will try.Collection: Mistake