Peter Drucker Quotes

333 quotes in 2807 categories

• 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 all over the…
• Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.
• (Waste = Loss): The first rule of business is to survive and the guiding principle of business economics is not the maximisation of profit, it…
• Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force.…
• Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable.
• 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…
• A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.
• The success and ultimately the survival of every business, large or small, depends in the last analysis on its ability to develop people. This ability…
• Ideas are cheap and abundant; what is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.
• Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet…
• If you want it, measure it. If you can't measure it, forget it.
• Yet there is nothing more dangerous than to be premature in exploiting a change in perception.
• People learn the most when teaching others.
• An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.
• The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try.
• We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.
• Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.
• If general perception changes from seeing the glass as 'half-full' to seeing it as 'half empty' there are major innovative opportunities.
• Thus, for those who are willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and…
• Business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.

Browse Peter Drucker Quotes by Category