Peter Drucker Quotes

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.

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.

2. Don’t diversify, don’t splinter, don’t try to do too many things at once. This is, of course, the corollary to the ‘do’: be focused!

The truly important events on the outside are not the trends. They are changes in the trends.

The prevailing economic theory of business enterprise and behavior, the maximization of profit—which is simply a complicated way of phrasing the old saw of buying cheap and selling dear—may adequately explain how Richard Sears operated. But it cannot explain how Sears, Roebuck or any other business enterprise operates, nor how it should operate. The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.

The best way to predict your future is to create it

Innovations had better be capable of being started small, requiring at first little money, few people, and only a small and limited market. Otherwise, there is not enough time to make the adjustments and changes that are almost always needed for an innovation to succeed. Initially innovations rarely are more than ‘almost right’. The necessary changes can be made only if the scale is small and the requirements for people and money fairly modest.

The most important thing about priorities and posteriorities is not intelligent analysis but courage.

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.

while almost every large organization has an appraisal procedure, few of them actually use it.

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained.

Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates a resource. There is no such thing as a ‘resource’ until man finds a use for something in nature and thus endows it with economic value. Until then, every plant is a weed and every mineral just another rock.

in its people decisions, management must demonstrate that it realizes that integrity is one absolute requirement of a manager, the one quality that he has to bring with him and cannot be expected to acquire later on. And management must demonstrate that it requires the same integrity of itself.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behaviour is meaningless data