Peter F. Drucker > Quotes

“Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.”
― Peter Drucker

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
― Peter Drucker, Essential Drucker

“The best way to predict your future is to create it”
― Peter Drucker

“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”
― Peter Drucker

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.”
― Peter Drucker

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”
― Peter Drucker

“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”
― 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

“What's measured improves”
― Peter Drucker

“Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.”
― Peter Drucker

“Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.”
― 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 F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. ”
― Peter Drucker

“Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship - the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers.
The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.”
― Peter Drucker

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”
― Peter Drucker

“People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.”
― Peter Drucker

“The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices

“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”
― Peter Drucker

“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”
― Peter Drucker

“Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.”
― Peter Drucker

“Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window. ”
― Peter Drucker

“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. ”
― Peter Drucker