Peter Drucker Quotes

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.

Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself - not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic.

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.

Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old

What gets measured gets managed.

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two - and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are 'costs'.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.

The key to greatness is to look for people's potential and spend time developing it.

An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance... Any attempt to go beyond that is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no "loyalty," he owes no "love" and no "attitudes" - he owes performance and nothing else. .... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.

Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person - hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre - into an outstanding performer.

The purpose of information is not knowledge. It is being able to take the right action.

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

The relevant question is not simply what shall we do tomorrow, but rather what shall we do today in order to get ready for tomorrow.

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.

The only real difference between one organization and another is the performance of its people.

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system's weaknesses irrelevant.

The leader sees leadership as responsibility rather than as rank and privilege.

The critical question is not "How can I achieve?" but "What can I contribute?"

The bеѕt wау tо predict уоur future іѕ tо create it.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.

The only skill that will be important in the 21st century is the skill of learning new skills.Everythi ng else will become obsolete over time.

There are two types of people in the business community: those who produce results and those who give you reasons why they didn't.

Leadership is lifting a person's vision to high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

If you have more than five goals, you have none.

The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it's dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it.

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

Mission defines strategy, and strategy defines structure.

Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.

Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer's point of view.

A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.

Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive.

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.

Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.

The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.

Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don't have enough of it, you're out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you're really missing something.

The "non-profit" institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its "product" is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their "product" is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.

Morale in an organization does not mean that "people get along together"; the test is performance not conformance.

Leaders grow; they are not made.

The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.