Peter Drucker Quotes

effective executives make the strengths of the boss productive.

tonsils or half the appendix risks as much infection or shock as if he did the whole job. And he has not cured the condition, has indeed made it worse. He either operates or he doesn’t. Similarly, the effective decision-maker either acts or he doesn’t act. He does not take half-action. This is the one thing that is always wrong, and the one sure way not to satisfy the minimum specifications, the minimum boundary conditions.

Another predictable result of leaving control of priorities to the pressures is that the work of top management does not get done at all. That is always postponable work, for it does not try to solve yesterday’s crises but to make a different tomorrow.

If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.

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

The brilliant insight is not by itself achievement

The assertion that “somebody else will not let me do anything” should always be suspected as a cover-up for inertia.

One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.

The effective executive will therefore ask: “Does this man have strength in one major area? And is this strength relevant to the task? If he achieves excellence in this one area, will it make a significant difference?” And if the answer is “yes,” he will go ahead and appoint the man.

But what stands out in Japanese history, as well as in today’s Japanese management behavior, is the capacity for making 180-degree turns — that is, for reaching radical and highly controversial decisions.

blackout one New York newspaper managed to appear: The New York Times. It had shifted its printing operations immediately across the Hudson to Newark, New Jersey, where the power plants were functioning and where a local paper, The Newark Evening News, had a substantial printing plant. But instead of the million copies the Times management had ordered, fewer than half this number actually reached the readers. Just as the Times went to press (so at least goes a widely told anecdote) the executive editor and three of his assistants started arguing how to hyphenate one word. This took them forty-eight minutes (so it is said) — or half of the available press time. The Times, the editor argued, sets a standard for written English in the United States and therefore cannot afford a grammatical mistake.

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service.

It is hard to realize today that “government” during the American Civil War a hundred years ago meant the merest handful of people. Lincoln’s Secretary of War had fewer than fifty civilian subordinates, most of them not “executives” and policy-makers but telegraph clerks. The entire Washington establishment of the U.S. government in Theodore Roosevelt’s time, around 1900, could be comfortably housed in any one of the government buildings along the Mall today.

Follow these five decision steps when hiring someone: Understand the job, consider three to five people, study candidates performance records to find their strengths, talk to the candidates’ colleagues about them, and once hired, explain the assignment to the new employee.

Do first things first, and second things not at all.