Peter Drucker Quotes

[T]he Western European democracies... will be forced into totalitarianism unless they produce a noneconomic society striving for the freedom and equality of the individual.

The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves...

A well-managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory that is “dramatic,” a factory in which the “epic of industry” is unfolded before the visitor’s eyes, is poorly managed. A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.

One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.

The days of the 'intuitive' manager are numbered.

Unless we realize that the essence of Nazism is also an attempt to solve a universal problem of Western civilization - that of the industrial society - and that the basic principles on which the Nazis base this attempt are also in no way confined to Germany, we do not know what we fight for or what we fight against... The war is being fought for the structure of industrial society--its basic principles, its purposes, and its institutions.

bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.

Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. And it has been proven as much of an illusion in Stalinist Russia as it proven an illusion in pre-Hitler Germany. Communism in anything but name was abandoned in Russia when the Five-Year Plan was substituted for the New Economic Policy (NEP) after Lenin’s death.

Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will... be taken over by a Central government...

As this example suggests, it is rarely possible — or even particularly fruitful — to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question in most cases should be, Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half ? The answer must balance several things. First, the results should be hard to achieve — they should require “stretching,” to use the current buzzword. But also, they should be within reach. To aim at results that cannot be achieved — or that can be only under the most unlikely circumstances — is not being ambitious; it is being foolish. Second, the results should be meaningful. They should make a difference. Finally, results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable. From this will come a course of action: what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set. RESPONSIBILITY

Consider the experience of a newly appointed hospital administrator. The hospital was big and prestigious, but it had been coasting on its reputation for 30 years.

Finally, goals and objectives for each area need to be set. Everyone who takes on the primary responsibility for a key activity, whether product development or people, or money, must be asked: ‘What can this enterprise expect of you? What should we hold you accountable for? What are you trying to accomplish and by what time?’ But this is elementary management, of course.

A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant - and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates

No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.