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
Do the right things instead of trying to do everything right.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Perfectionism
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
Information is, above all, a principle of economy. The fewer data needed, the better the information. An overload of information leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Information
There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Management, Retirement
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
The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Entrepreneurs, Change
The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Management
Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes … but no plans.
—Peter Drucker
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Vision, The Future, Future, Creativity
More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.
—Peter Drucker
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
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
Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Time
There are an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Stress
The computer is a moron.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Computers
Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Time Management, Time
The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Right, Rightness
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Decision, Business
The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Act, Results, Knowledge, Now, Focus, Action
There are no creeds in mathematics.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Mathematics
Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Action
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
The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Future, Change, The Future, Past and Present
Business has only two functions—marketing and innovation.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Business
The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Knowledge
We greatly overestimate what we can accomplish in one year. But we greatly underestimate what we can accomplish in five years.
—Peter Drucker
So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Difficulty, Management
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: Rest, Knowledge, Will, Now, Learn
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
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
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