Peter Drucker quotes - page 3

Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't. (Peter Drucker)
No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings. View quote
Peter Drucker
"Loafing" is easy, but "leisure" is difficult. View quote
Peter Drucker
Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management. View quote
Peter Drucker
Through systematic terror, through indoctrination, through systematic manipulation of stimulus, reward, and punishment, we can today break man and convert him into brute animal... The first step toward survival is therefore to make government legitimate again by attempting to deprive it of these powers... by international action to ban such powers. View quote
Peter Drucker
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. View quote
Peter Drucker
There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer. View quote
Peter Drucker
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. View quote
Peter Drucker
There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable. View quote
Peter Drucker
Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions. View quote
Peter Drucker
Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art. (Peter Drucker)
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." View quote
Peter Drucker
A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure. View quote
Peter Drucker
Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred. View quote
Peter Drucker
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. View quote
Peter Drucker
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. View quote
Peter Drucker
...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. View quote
Peter Drucker
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. View quote
Peter Drucker
A manager sets objectives - A manager organizes - A manager motivates and communicates - A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures. View quote
Peter Drucker
Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it. View quote
Peter Drucker
Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution. (Peter Drucker)
No matter how deeply wedded one may be to the free enterprise system (and I, for one, am wedded for life), one has to accept the need for positive government; one has to consider government action on a sizable scale as desirable rather than as a necessary evil. View quote
Peter Drucker
We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad, ...We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order... We see change as being order itself--indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one. View quote
Peter Drucker
The postwar [WWII] GI Bill of Rights - and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans - signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century. We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world. View quote
Peter Drucker
The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool. View quote
Peter Drucker