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Leadership Quotes by Peter Drucker

48 Leadership quotes by Peter Drucker

All Leadership quotes Peter Drucker’s page

Peter Drucker argues that leaders succeed by stopping the wrong actions, not just by learning new tasks. He sees leadership as a result of aligning strengths so that weaknesses fade away. Management, to his view, replaces muscle with thoughtful cooperation.

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If you want it, measure it. If you can't measure it, forget it.

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Leadership is an achievement of trust.

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The building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

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The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.

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People learn the most when teaching others.

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Leadership is all about getting results.

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Leaders grow; they are not made.

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Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

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Quality of character doesn't make a leader, but the lack of it flaws the entire process.

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

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Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.

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A fundamental responsibility of leadership is make sure that everybody knows the mission, understands it, lives it.

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

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

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Management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.

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

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We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don't spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half…

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Leadership is lifting a person's vision to high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of…

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The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, "If…

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Too many leaders try to do a little bit of 25 things and get nothing done. They are very popular because they…

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Some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I've worked with over a sixty-five-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were…

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Don't take on things you don't believe in and that you yourself are not good at. Learn to say no. Effective leaders…

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The person who will make the greatest contribution to a company is the mature person-and you cannot have maturity if you have…

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Successful leaders don't start out asking, 'What do I want to do?' They ask, 'What needs to be done?' Then they ask,…

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The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance…

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The greatest challenge to organizations is the balance between continuity and change. You need both. At different times, the balance is slightly…

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Fortunately or unfortunately, the one predictable thing in any organization is the crisis. That always comes. That's when you do depend on…

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Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of…

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One does not "manage" people. The task is to lead people.

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Leadership is more doing than dash.

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Leadership is defined by results not attributes.

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Leadership is all hype. We've had three great leaders in this century-Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

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

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It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.

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

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Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.

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Leaders shouldn?t attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can?t compromise.

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

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Leadership is not rank, privileges, title or money. It is responsibility.

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We will have to learn to lead people rather then to contain them.

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More by Peter Drucker

One reason for the tremendous increase in health-care costs in the U.S. is managerial neglect of the "hotel services" by the people who dominate…

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

Results is all that separates one company from another.

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

Our society has become an employee society.

Replace your pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution.

Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for…

Don't try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present!

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

We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to…

When it rains manna from heaven, some people put up an umbrella. Others reach for a big spoon.

The enterprise can fulfill its human and social functions only if it prospers as a business.

The computer actually may have aggravated management's degenerative tendency to focus inward on costs.

Nobody can predict the future; the idea is to have a firm grasp of the present.

An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.