Peter Drucker Quotes

For every organization needs performance in three major areas: It needs direct results; building of values and their reaffirmation; and building and developing people for tomorrow.

An organization, a social artifact, is very different from a biological organism. Yet it stands under the law that governs the structure and size of animals and plants: The surface goes up with the square of the radius, but the mass grows with the cube. The larger the animal becomes, the more resources have to be devoted to the mass and to the internal tasks, to circulation and information, to the nervous system, and so on.

Each [co-worker] works his or her way, not your way. And each is entitled to work in his or her way. What matters is whether they perform and what their values are. As far as how they perform — each is likely to do it differently. The first secret to effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values. Working relationships are as much based on the people as they are on the work.

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.

What makes demographics such a rewarding opportunity for the entrepreneur is precisely its neglect by decision makers, whether businessmen, public-service staffs, or governmental policymakers. They still cling to the assumption that demographics do not change – or do not change fast. Indeed, they reject even the plainest evidence of demographic changes.

Measuring requires, first and foremost, analytical ability. But it also demands that measurement be used to make self-control possible, rather than abused to control people from the outside and above — that is, to dominate them.

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

When General Eisenhower was elected president, his predecessor, Harry Truman, said: “Poor Ike; when he was a general, he gave an order and it was carried out. Now he is going to sit in that big office and he’ll give an order and not a damn thing is going to happen.” The reason why “not a damn thing is going to happen” is, however, not that generals have more authority than presidents. It is that military organizations learned long ago that futility is the lot of most orders and organized the feedback to check on the execution of the order. They learned long ago that to go oneself and look is the only reliable feedback.5 Reports — all an American president is normally able to mobilize — are not much help. All military services have long ago learned that the officer who has given an order goes out and sees for himself whether it has been carried out. At the least he sends one of his own aides — he never relies on what he is told by the subordinate to whom the order was given. Not that he distrusts the subordinate; he has learned from experience to distrust communications.

The first secret of effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values. Working relationships are as much based on the people as they are on the work.

Direct results always come first. In the care and feeding of an organization, they play the role calories play in the nutrition of the human body.

Only productivity of the knowledge worker can make it possible for developed countries to maintain their high standard of living against the competition of low-wage, developing economies.

The “non-profit” institution neither supplies goods or services nor controls. Its “product” is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their “product” is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.

To do the most good requires saying no to pressures to stray, and the discipline to stop doing what does not fit.

The subject of this book is managing oneself for effectiveness.

The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.