Peter drucker quotes

Don't solve problems. Pursue opportunities.

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

The true business of every company is to make and keep customers.

The fruit of your work grows on other people's trees

The only skill that will be important in the 21st century is the skill of learning new skills.Everythi ng else will become obsolete over time.

Knowledge is the source of Wealth. Applied to tasks we already know, it becomes Productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes Innovation.

History has been written not by the most talented but by the most motivated.

No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.

What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or a service does for the customer.

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside.The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a satisfied patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise there are only costs.

Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen.

If you can't measure it, you can't change it.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time - literally - substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.

Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.

Leadership is lifting a person's vision to high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

Strategic planning is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial (risk-taking) decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity; organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions; and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback.

You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths.

I no longer think that learning how to manage people, especially subordinates, is the most important for executives to learn. I am teaching above all else, how to manage oneself.

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.

If you want to predict the future create it.

Most leaders don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.

There is no perfect strategic decision. One always has to pay a price. One always has to balance conflicting objectives, conflicting opinions, and conflicting priorities. The best strategic decision is only an approximation - and a risk.

If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

The job of a professional manager is not to like people. It is not to change people. It is to put their strengths to work.

Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.

In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle.

The leader sees leadership as responsibility rather than as rank and privilege.

Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.

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

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two - and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are 'costs'.

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic.

To make the future demands courage. It demands work. But it also demands faith.

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.

The most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question.

Defending yesterday is far more risky than making tomorrow.

As a manager you're paid to be uncomfortable. If you're comfortable, it's a sure sign you're doing things wrong.

The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system's weaknesses irrelevant.

Our job in life is to make a positive difference, not prove we're right.

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.

Use feedback analysis to identify your strengths. Then go to work on improving your strengths. Identify and eliminate bad habits that hinder the full development of your strengths. Figure out what you should do and do it. Finally, decide what you should not do.

Listening is not a skill; it is a discipline.

Innovative efforts should never report to line managers charged with responsibility for ongoing operations. The new project is an infant and will remain one for the foreseeable future, and infants belong in the nursery. The 'adults', that is, the executives in charge of existing businesses or products will have neither the time nor understanding for the infant.

It's more important to do the right thing than to do things right.

The worker's effectiveness is determined largely by the way he is being managed.

Strong people have strong weaknesses.

The greatest challenge to organizations is the balance between continuity and change. You need both. At different times, the balance is slightly more over here, or slightly more over there, but you need both. And balance is basically the greatest task in leadership. Organizations have to have continuity, and yet if there is not enough new challenge, not enough change, they become empty bureaucracies, awfully fast.

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person - hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre - into an outstanding performer.

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

Do what you do best, and outsource the rest.

Ideas are like frog eggs: you've got to lay a thousand to hatch one.

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old

To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.

The person who will make the greatest contribution to a company is the mature person-and you cannot have maturity if you have no life or interest outside the job.

The critical question is not "How can I achieve?" but "What can I contribute?"

Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive.

There are two types of people in the business community: those who produce results and those who give you reasons why they didn't.

People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.

The relevant question is not simply what shall we do tomorrow, but rather what shall we do today in order to get ready for tomorrow.

More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.

What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.

Look upon every obstacle as part payment towards your success.

In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.

Once the facts are clear the decisions jump out at you.

Every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise.

A manager sets objectives - A manager organizes - A manager motivates and communicates - A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures - A manager develops people.

An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance... Any attempt to go beyond that is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no "loyalty," he owes no "love" and no "attitudes" - he owes performance and nothing else. .... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.

The key to greatness is to look for people's potential and spend time developing it.

Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.

The "non-profit" institution neither supplies goods or services not 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.

We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don't spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop

Mission defines strategy, and strategy defines structure.

Leadership is an achievement of trust.

No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.

The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.

Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything.

It’s up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.

A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.

An organization belongs on a sick list when promotion becomes more important to its people than accomplishment of their job they are in. It is sick when it is more concerned with avoiding mistakes than with taking risks, with counteracting the weaknesses of its members than with building on their strength. But it is sick also when "good human relations" become more important than performance and achievement.

Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don't have enough of it, you're out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you're really missing something.

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.

The purpose of information is not knowledge. It is being able to take the right action.

Do the right things instead of trying to do everything right.

Morale in an organization does not mean that "people get along together"; the test is performance not conformance.

The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.

The bеѕt wау tо predict уоur future іѕ tо create it.

There is nothing worse than doing the wrong thing well.

Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.

If you want to improve how you manage time - stop doing what doesn't need to be done!

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

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it's dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it.

In todays economy, the most important resource is no longer labor, capital or land; it is knowledge

One cannot buy, rent or hire more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it. Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time. All work takes place in, and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource.

Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.

It's amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed.

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

Listening (the first competence of leadership) is not a skill, it is a discipline. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.

The only real difference between one organization and another is the performance of its people.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

The organization is, above all, social. It is people.

Focus on opportunities, not problems.

What gets measured gets managed.

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up.

Management is not being brilliant. Management is being conscientious.

Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.

Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer's point of view.

The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things.

The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

Marketing and innovation make money. Everything else is a cost.

Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself - not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

If you have more than five goals, you have none.

Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.