Peter Drucker Quotes

There is tremendous stress these days on liking people, helping people, getting along with people, as qualifications for a manager. These alone are never enough. In every successful organization there is one boss who does not like people, who does not help them, and who does not get along with them. Cold, unpleasant, demanding, he often teaches and develops more men than anyone else. He commands more respect than the most likable man ever could. He demands exacting workmanship of himself as well as of his men. He sets high standards and expects that they will be lived up to. He considers only what is right and never who is right. And though often himself a man of brilliance, he never rates intellectual brilliance above integrity in others. The manager who lacks these qualities of character — no matter how likable, helpful, or amiable, no matter even how competent or brilliant — is a menace and should be adjudged “unfit to be a manager and a gentleman.

Decisions exist only in the present.

[C]hronic unemployment is a denial of citizenship, a destruction of the rationality of our society, and a sign that we are socially incapable of mastering our economic tools. Reasonably full employment... is... a prerequisite to internal stability. ...[F]ailure to stabilize our economy would be the most severe threat to international order.

That the government's power under the Taft-Hartley Act to stop a strike by injunction so clearly strengthens the hand of the employer—even though it is used only when a strike threatens the national health, welfare, or safety—is a grave blemish and explains much of union resistance to the Act.

There can be no freedom if one man or one group of men... is assumed... inherently perfect or perfectible. Its claim to perfection or perfectibility is a claim to absolute rule.

But if one can lock the door, disconnect the telephone, and sit down to wrestle with the report for five or six hours without interruption, one has a good chance to come up with what I call a “zero draft” — the one before the first draft. From then on, one can indeed work in fairly small installments, can rewrite, correct, and edit section by section, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence.

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?"

It is, above all, fruitless and a waste of time to worry about what is acceptable and what one had better not say so as not to evoke resistance. The things one worries about never happen. And objections and difficulties no one thought about suddenly turn out to be almost insurmountable obstacles. One gains nothing, in other words, by starting out with the question “What is acceptable?” And in the process of answering it, one loses any chance to come up with an effective, let alone with the right, answer.

The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.

Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant.

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.

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.

…control has to be by feedback from the work done. The work itself has to provide the information. If it has to be checked all the time, there is no control

We hear a great deal of talk about the midlife crisis of the executive. It is mostly boredom. At 45, most executives have reached the peak of their business careers, and they know it. After 20 years of doing very much the same kind of work, they are very good at their jobs. But they are not learning or contributing or deriving challenge and satisfaction from the job. And yet they are still likely to face another 20 if not 25 years of work. That is why managing oneself increasingly leads one to begin a second career.
There are three ways to develop a second career. The first is actually to start one. [...] The second way to prepare for the second half of your life is to develop a parallel career. [...] Finally, there are the social entrepreneurs.
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There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life: You must begin doing so long before you enter it.

Growth as a goal, to repeat, is delusion. William James, the American philosopher, talked of the "bitch goddess success." A philosopher of business today might well talk of the "bitch goddess growth."