Peter Drucker Quotes

Managers are responsible for service results.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker

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. It is the common violation of this principle that largely explains why measurement is the weakest area in the work of the manager today. As long as measurements are abused as a tool of control (for instance, as when measurements are used, as a weapon of an internal secret police that supplies audits and critical appraisals of a manager’s performance to the boss without even sending a carbon copy to the manager himself) measuring will remain the weakest area in the manager’s performance.2

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 his understanding them. He is like a blindfolded man in a strange room playing a game of which he does not know the rules.

As this example suggests, it is rarely possible — or even particularly fruitful — to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question in most cases should be, Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half ? The answer must balance several things. First, the results should be hard to achieve — they should require “stretching,” to use the current buzzword. But also, they should be within reach. To aim at results that cannot be achieved — or that can be only under the most unlikely circumstances — is not being ambitious; it is being foolish. Second, the results should be meaningful. They should make a difference. Finally, results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable. From this will come a course of action: what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set. RESPONSIBILITY

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.

Decisions are made by men. Men are fallible; at their best their works do not last long. Even the best decision has a high probability of being wrong. Even the most effective one eventually becomes obsolete.

functional design, where it applies, makes the least psychological demands on the people. They are highly secure both in their work and in their relationships. When it, however, is being used beyond fairly narrow limits of size and complexity it creates emotional tensions, hostilities, and insecurities. People will then tend to see themselves and their functions belittled, besieged, attacked. They will come to see it as their first job to defend their function, to protect it against marauders in other functions, to make sure “it doesn’t get pushed around.

At one point quantity turned into quality.

No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.

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 rule is simple: Any job that has defeated two or three men in succession, even though each had performed well in his previous assignments, must be assumed unfit for human beings. It must be redesigned.

But above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule. An organization in which everybody meets all the time is an organization in which no one gets anything done.

Management by drive, like management by ‘bellows and meat ax,’ is a sure sign of confusion. It is an admission of incompetence. It is a sign that management does not know how to plan. But, above all, it is a sign that the company does not know what to expect of its managers – that, not knowing how to direct them, it misdirects them.