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
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
—Peter Drucker
Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes … but no plans.
—Peter Drucker
My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.
—Peter Drucker
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.
—Peter Drucker
We greatly overestimate what we can accomplish in one year. But we greatly underestimate what we can accomplish in five years.
—Peter Drucker
Planning is not masterminding the future. Any attempt to do so is foolish; the future is unpredictable.
—Peter Drucker
Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined.
—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
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
The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say “I”. And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say “I”. They don’t think “I”. They think “we”; they think “team”. They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but “we” gets the credit… This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.
—Peter Drucker
The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: The Future, Change, Past and Present, Future
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
—Peter Drucker
The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.
—Peter Drucker
Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.
—Peter Drucker
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.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Leaders, Leadership
Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Reputation, Integrity
Effective leaders delegate, but they do not delegate the one thing that will set the standards. They do it.
—Peter Drucker
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Vision, Future, The Future, Creativity
There are times to face the fact that the organization as a whole is not performing-that there are weak results everywhere and little prospect of improving. It may be time to merge or liquidate and put your energies somewhere else.
—Peter Drucker
Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.
—Peter Drucker
The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Work
Building around mission and long-term goals is the only way to integrate shorter-term interests.
—Peter Drucker
There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Mediocrity, Goals, Purpose
Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
—Peter Drucker
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
—Peter Drucker
Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
—Peter Drucker
Follow effective action with quiet reflection.
From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Action
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
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