Peter Drucker Quotations

• When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. 

• My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.

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

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

• Business has only two basic functions-marketing and innovation.

• A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.
• Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.
• The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the MANUAL WORKER in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.
• The best way to predict the future is to create it.
• Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
• Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.
• Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.
• Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.
• Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
• Borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
• An important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.
• Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.
• Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
• Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
• Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
• 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.
• Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
• 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.
• The great mystery isn't that people do things badly but that they occasionally do a few things well. The only thing that is universal is incompetence. Strength is always specific! Nobody ever commented, for example, that the great violinist Jascha Heifetz probably couldn't play the trumpet very well.

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