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 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: Results, Knowledge, Action, Act, Focus, Now
Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the “naturals,” the ones who somehow know how to teach.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Teaching
Follow effective action with quiet reflection.
From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Follow, Action
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
My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.
—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
Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Effectiveness
Education can no longer be the sole property of the state.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Education
Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Integrity, Consequences, Reputation
The computer is a moron.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Computers
Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
—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
Decision making is the specific executive task.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Decisions
The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Right, Rightness
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: Commitment, Goals
Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
—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 things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction, and malperformance.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Disorder, Business, Organization
One cannot manage change, one can only be ahead of it.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Change
The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: The Future, Change, Future, Past and Present
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, Willpower, Will
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
So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Management, Difficulty
Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Decide, Success, Business, Decisions, Courage
It’s more important to do the right thing than to do things right.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Integrity
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
The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Management
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Decision, Business
There are an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Stress
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
—Peter Drucker
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
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
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
—Peter Drucker
Topics: The Future, Creativity, Vision, Future
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
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
Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.
—Peter Drucker
Don’t try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present!
—Peter Drucker
Topics: Future
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
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
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