Peter Drucker
Knowledge people and service people learn the most when they teach .Collection: Leadership
Erroneous assumptions can be disastrous.Collection: Thinking
If general perception changes from seeing the glass as 'half-full' to seeing it as 'half empty' there are major innovative opportunities.Collection: Opportunity
That people even in well paid jobs choose ever earlier retirement is a severe indictment of our organizations - not just business, but government service, the universities. These people don't find their jobs interesting.Collection: Retirement
Follow effective action with quiet reflection.Collection: Reflection
When the business grows, the person who founded it is incredibly busy. Rapid growth puts an enormous strain on a business. You outgrow your production facilities. You outgrow your management capabilities.Collection: Growth
Leaders grow; they are not made.Collection: Leadership
No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility.Collection: Work
Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not bounced.Collection: Organization
Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual. They fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.Collection: Men
We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out.Collection: Smart
The next thing to be said about what long-range planning is not, is that it does not deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions. Decisions exist only in the present. The question that faces the long-range planner is not what we should do tomorrow.Collection: Inspirational
The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.Collection: Inspirational
People in any organization, including bureaucrats and politicians, are always attached to the obsolete; the obsolescent; the things that should have worked but didn't; the things that once were productive and no longer are.Collection: Leadership
Time is the scarcest resource.Collection: Time
Our most important education system is in the employees' own organization.Collection: Organization
It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.Collection: Moving
Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.Collection: Art
The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him.Collection: Thinking
The world political system is till based on the concept of the national sovereign state. For the first time therefore, in three hundred years economy and sovereignty are becoming divorced from each other.Collection: Years
There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology , society , economy , and institutions .Collection: Technology
The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.Collection: Firsts
It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.Collection: Priorities
Miracles are great, but they're so damn unpredictable.Collection: Sports
[Management] has authority only as long as it performs.Collection: Long
Succession planning often results in the selection of a weaker representation of yourself.Collection: Planning
Profit is not a cause but a result-Collection: Causes
A business enterprise must continue beyond the lifetime of the individual or of the generation to be capable of producing its contributions to economy and to society.Collection: Generations
There is a point at which a transformation has to take place.Collection: Transformation
One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.Collection: Entrepreneur
When it rains manna from heaven, some people put up an umbrella. Others reach for a big spoon.Collection: Rain
Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!Collection: Men
Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?Collection: Differences
The computer, being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data.Collection: Data
Decision making is the specific executive task.Collection: Decision
Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.Collection: Technology
Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validityCollection: Purpose
Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business - in demographics, in values, in technology or science - and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.Collection: Technology
Systematic change requires a willingness to look on change as an opportunity.Collection: Opportunity
Tomorrow always arrives. It is always different. And even the mightiest company is in trouble if it has not worked on the future. Being surprised by what happens is a risk that even the largest and richest company cannot afford, and even the smallest business need not run.Collection: Running
When Henry Ford said, "The customer can have a car in any color as long as it's black," he was not joking.Collection: Color
One does not "manage" people. The task is to lead people.Collection: People
An effective executive builds on strengths - their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates, and on the strength of the situation.Collection: Situation
Knowledge is power, which is why people who had it in the past often tried to make a secret of it. In post-capitalism, power comes from transmitting information to make it productive, not from hiding it.Collection: Communication
Management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.Collection: Waiting
The company is not and must never claim to be home, family, religion, life or fate for the individual. It must never interfere in his private life or his citizenship. He is tied to the company through a voluntary and cancellable employment contract, not through some mystical or indissoluble bond.Collection: Home
To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.Collection: Knowledge
Strategic management is not a box of tricks or a bundle of techniques. It is analytical thinking and commitment of resources to action. But quantification alone is not planning. Some of the most important issues in strategic management cannot be quantified at all.Collection: Commitment
The only industries that function well are the industries that take responsibility for training. The Japanese, you know, assume that when you first come to work you know absolutely nothing. School isn't preparation for work and never was.Collection: School