Peter Drucker Quotes

The creative imitator looks at products or services from the viewpoint of the customer. IBM’s personal computer is practically indistinguishable from the Apple in its technical features, but IBM from the beginning offered the customer programs and software. Apple maintained traditional computer distribution through specialty stores. IBM — in a radical break with its own traditions — developed all kinds of distribution channels, specialty stores, major retailers like Sears, Roebuck, its own retail stores, and so on. It made it easy for the consumer to buy and it made it easy for the consumer to use the product. These, rather than hardware features, were the “innovations” that gave IBM the personal computer market.

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.

For the individual there is no society unless he has social status and function.
There must be a definite functional relationship between individual life and group life.
For the individual without function and status, society is irrational, incalculable and shapeless.
The “rootless” individual, the outcast - for absence of social function and status casts a man from the society of his fellows - sees no society.
He sees only demoniac forces, half sensible, half meaningless, half in light and half in darkness, but never predictable.
They decide about his life and livelihood without the possibility of interference on his part, indeed without the possibility of understanding them.
He is like a blindfolded man in a strange room playing a game of which he does not know the rules.

To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.

All organizations must be capable of change. We need concepts and measurements that give to other kinds of organizations what the market test and profitability yardstick give to business. Those tests and yardsticks will be quite different.

DuPont, for 130 years, had confined itself to making munitions and explosives. In the mid-1920s it then organized its first research efforts in other areas, one of them the brand-new field of polymer chemistry, which the Germans had pioneered during World War I. For several years there were no results at all. Then, in 1928, an assistant left a burner on over the weekend. On Monday morning, Wallace H. Carothers, the chemist in charge, found that the stuff in the kettle had congealed into fibers. It took another ten years before DuPont found out how to make Nylon intentionally. The point of the story is, however, that the same accident had occurred several times in the laboratories of the big German chemical companies with the same results, and much earlier. The Germans were, of course, looking for a polymerized fiber — and they could have had it, along with world leadership in the chemical industry, ten years before DuPont had Nylon. But because they had not planned the experiment, they dismissed its results, poured out the accidentally produced fibers, and started all over again.

Values, in other words, are and should be the ultimate test.

others is required, it probably indicates a lack of courtesy — that is, a lack of manners.

Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.

What is our mission? Who is our customer? What does the customer value? What are our results? and What is our plan?

This failure to ask reflects human stupidity less than it reflects human history.

Everyone can make the wrong decision — in fact, everyone will sometimes make a wrong decision. But no one needs to make a decision which, on its face, falls short of satisfying the boundary conditions.

…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

Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust. The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another. Taking responsibility for relationships is therefore an absolute necessity. It is a duty. Whether one is a member of the organization, a consultant to it, a supplier, or a distributor, one owes that responsibility to all one’s coworkers: those whose work one depends on as well as those who depend on one’s own work.

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.