Peter Drucker quotes - page 11

Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese. (Peter Drucker)
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. View quote
Peter Drucker
If a government commission had worked on the horse, you would have the first horse that could operate its knee joint in both directions. The trouble is it couldn't have stood up. View quote
Peter Drucker
The one to distrust is the person who never makes a mistake, never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried and the trivial. View quote
Peter Drucker
Decision making is the specific executive task. View quote
Peter Drucker
The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent. View quote
Peter Drucker
Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change. View quote
Peter Drucker
Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes. View quote
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. View quote
Peter Drucker
In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a non-world. View quote
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)
Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm. View quote
Peter Drucker
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. View quote
Peter Drucker
Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two - and only two - basic functions marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results all the rest are costs. View quote
Peter Drucker
To improve communications, work not on the utterer, but the recipient. View quote
Peter Drucker
If a manager spends more than 10 percent of his time on human relations the group is probably too large. View quote
Peter Drucker
Of course, every revolution repudiates what went on before and considers itself a conscious break with the past; it is only posterity that sees, or imagines it sees, the historical continuity. Fascism, however, goes much further in its negation of the past than any earlier political movement, because it makes this negation its main platform. What is even more important, it denies simultaneously ideas and tendencies which are in themselves antithetic. It is antiliberal, but it is also anticonservative; antireligious and antiatheist; anticapitalist and antisocialist; antiwar and antipacifist... View quote
Peter Drucker
Freedom rests on ethical decisions. But the political sphere deals with power. ...Individually, power may well be the goal of personal ambition. But socially it is a servant; its organization is only a means to a social end. ...[P]ower distributes rank and determines relations within society; it is a means of internal organization. But the end of society is always an ethical purpose. View quote
Peter Drucker
[W]e are all learning fast that we have to respect each other's basic beliefs and institutions, however much we must dislike them. If there is one lesson to this war, it is that the attempt to impose one's own system on the world, such as was made by both the Germans and the Japanese, must end not only in total world-wide conflict, but in the defeat and destruction of the country that makes the attempt. View quote
Peter Drucker
[N]othing is easier to attain than full employment... All we would have to do, for instance, would be to continue a war-economy at no more, perhaps, than half its present level. Or we could adopt some sort of state socialism, under which the surplus resources... would be employed on non-economic projects, it makes... little difference what twentieth century equivalent of the Egyptian pyramids... so long as we do not use the surplus labor to produce ordinary economic goods. ...But we refuse to accept the kind of society to which either [a permanent war economy or state socialism] would lead. We demand more than a stable society, we demand a good society. Specifically, we demand of our economic system... that it produce goods... that add to the wealth... and... that these goods be produced... under... the free enterprise system. View quote
Peter Drucker
[T]he nineteenth century was under the illusion that citizenship can take care of itself. It thought that a free society was "natural" and... would maintain itself by its own momentum. ..."[A]utomatic progress" would preserve liberty. ...[T]hese beliefs were false... they were destructive. They are not... the source and origin of Hitlerism, but they greatly facilitated its rise. (Peter Drucker)
We need in this modern world... an incredible number of very highly trained technicians and professional men... But nothing will be gained unless [they] are also educated as citizens... to know about the ends, the beliefs, the purposes, to... which their craft and skill is to contribute... about the basic issues which... every generation of free men has had to decide... [I]t is the liberal arts... that is our lighthouse in the dark and uncharted waters of the postwar world. View quote
Peter Drucker