Best Peter Drucker Quotes

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.

The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

The better a man is the more mistakes he will make for the more things he will try.

Until we can manage TIME, we can manage nothing else.

Decision making is the specific executive task.

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

Leadership is not magnetic personality--that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not making friends and influencing people --that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

Time is the scarcest resource of the manager; If it is not managed, nothing else can be managed

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.

Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

Management by objective works -- if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.

Concentration is the key to economic results. No other principles of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration.

Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

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.

The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.

Business has only two functions -- marketing and innovation.

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.

Education can no longer be the sole property of the state.

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

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.

The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.

My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.

Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.

What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that's another matter.