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
Follow effective action with quiet reflection.
From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Follow, Action
Decision making is the specific executive task.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Decisions
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
—Peter Drucker
Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven’t.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Management
The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Work
We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Motivation, Motivational
There are no creeds in mathematics.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Mathematics
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Business, Decision
More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.
—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
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Advertising
Do the right things instead of trying to do everything right.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Perfectionism
Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes … but no plans.
—Peter Drucker
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, Time Management
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: Value, Time Management, Time
Business has only two functions—marketing and innovation.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Business
The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Business, Doubt
The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Management
Planning is not masterminding the future. Any attempt to do so is foolish; the future is unpredictable.
—Peter Drucker
Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Time
We greatly overestimate what we can accomplish in one year. But we greatly underestimate what we can accomplish in five years.
—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: Leadership, Leaders
To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Now, Learn, Knowledge, Rest, Will
When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Education
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: Learning, Mastery
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
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
The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Communication
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
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
Topics: Innovation
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