Peter Drucker (1909–2005) was an Austrian-born American management consultant, author, and lecturer on the modern organization. He was the most influential management philosopher of the modern era.
Over a 60 year-career, Drucker influenced the thinking of many executives in businesses, not-for-profits, and faith-based organizations. He authored over forty books and numerous essays on managerial skills, management concepts, and social analyses. He has been globally hailed as a seminal thinker, writer, and lecturer on the contemporary organization.
Drucker wrote about concepts such as knowledge workers, decentralization, management by objectives, and so on decades before they were trendy. His writings are devoid of buzzwords and management jargon and easily resonate with his readers. His thoughts are today accepted as conventional wisdom; business school courses around the world require the reading of his books. His keen insight and unique style of expression in clear language continue to have a significant influence on many successful businesspersons and management consultants.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Peter Drucker
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: The Future, Future, Creativity, Vision
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.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Time Management, Time
Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
—Peter Drucker
The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Business, Doubt
There are an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Stress
The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.
—Peter Drucker
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Decision, Business
Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Innovation
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.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Goals, Commitment
Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Leadership
Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folklore and superstition, and of cooperation for force…
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Management
The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Work
Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Time
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
—Peter Drucker
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?”
—Peter Drucker
Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Committees, Organization
There are no creeds in mathematics.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Mathematics
No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone’s work assignment and responsibility.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Action
The better a man is the more mistakes he will make for the more things he will try.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Mistakes
A business exists to create a customer.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Customers, Business
Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Time
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.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Teamwork
Decision making is the specific executive task.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Decisions
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.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Change
Planning is not masterminding the future. Any attempt to do so is foolish; the future is unpredictable.
—Peter Drucker
Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. So, for more than 60 years, I have kept studying one subject at a time.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Mastery, Learning
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.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Innovation
Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven’t.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Management
Business has only two functions—marketing and innovation.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Business
Effective leaders delegate, but they do not delegate the one thing that will set the standards. They do it.
—Peter Drucker
The corporation is the “master”, the employee is the “servant”. Because the corporation owns the means of production without which the employee could not make a living, the employee needs the corporation more than vice versa.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Capitalism
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.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Time, Time Management, Value
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.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Will Power, Will, Willpower
There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Purpose, Goals, Effectiveness, Mediocrity
Schools everywhere are organized on the assumption that there is only one right way to learn and that it is the same way for everybody. But to be forced to learn the way a school teaches is sheer hell for students who learn differently.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Money
Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Action
The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Communication
People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.
—Peter Drucker
Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Quality
Building around mission and long-term goals is the only way to integrate shorter-term interests.
—Peter Drucker
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Peter Senge American Management Consultant
Margaret J. Wheatley American Management Consultant
Stephen Covey American Self-help Author
Robin Sharma Canadian Writer, Motivational Speaker
Tom Peters American Management Consultant
Bruno Bettelheim Austrian-born Psychoanalyst
Arnold Schwarzenegger Austrian-American Actor, Politician
John Kotter American Management Consultant
Warren Bennis American Management Consultant
Seth Godin American Entrepreneur