InspiringQuotes

Peter Drucker Quotes:

Peter Drucker quotes

Ocupation: Author

Life: November 19, 1909 - November 11, 2005

Birthday: November 19

Death: November 11

famous quotes

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

Topics: Inspirational, Motivational, Business, Life Opportunity, Quality In Business

Quotation Peter Drucker The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the Quotes

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

Topics: Inspirational, Wise, Peace, Quiet Reflection, Reflecting

Quotation Peter Drucker Only three things happen naturally in organizations friction confusion and Quotes

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

Topics: Love, Inspirational, Life, Language And Communication, Language Skills

Quotation Peter Drucker Culture eats strategy for breakfast Quotes

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

Topics: Inspirational, Change, Leadership, Top Management, Management Motivation

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

source: - "Prison, revolution and reconciliation". Interview with Jonathan Steele, www.theguardian.com. May 15, 2009.

Topics: Inspirational, Success, Confidence, Spiritual Success, Opportunity For Success

Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.

Topics: Wise, Business, Goal, Quality In Business, Funny Boss Day

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

Topics: Inspirational, Leadership, Basketball, True Leader, Inspiring Leader

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

Topics: Work, Future, Entrepreneur, Inspirational Hard Work, Strategic Leadership

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

Topics: Motivational, Leadership, Business, Decisions Made, Making Decisions

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

Topics: Lunch, Mba, Decision, Business Decisions

Knowledge is power. In post-capitalism, power comes from transmitting information to make it productive, not hiding it.

Topics: Communication, Information, Hiding

The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.

Topics: Communication, Important, Cocktails

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

Topics: Inspiring, Business, Creativity, Innovation Inspiration, Inspiration And Innovation

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

Topics: Leadership, Organization, Doe

What gets measured gets managed.

Topics: Clever, Management Motivation, Motivational Management, 4 Hour Work Week

Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.

Topics: Art, Practice, Entrepreneurship, Young Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneur Motivational

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

Topics: Motivation, Book, Writing

Leadership is defined by results not attributes.

Topics: Leadership, Results, Attributes

People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.

Topics: Leadership, Organization, People

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 be clearly defined.

Topics: Education, Men, Innovation

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.

Topics: Inspirational, Leadership, Mistake, Management Motivation, Managing People

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.

Topics: Leadership, Teamwork, Jobs, Inspirational Team Building, Leadership And Management

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

Topics: Information, Economy, Born

Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.

Topics: Business, Power, Information, Profitability

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

Topics: Inspirational, Encouraging, Wise, Continuous Improvement, Knowledge And Experience

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

Topics: Leadership, Wise, Funny Inspirational, Managing Change, Managing People

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.

Topics: Effectiveness, Focus, Secret, First Things First, One Thing At A Time

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.

Topics: Excellence, Enemy, Adequacy

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.

Topics: Successful, Opportunity, Careers, Ordinary Person, Hardworking

The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it's selling.

Topics: Thinking, Selling, Company

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.

Topics: Leadership, Jobs, Firsts

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

Topics: Two, Giving, People

What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?

Topics: Institutions, Results, Performances

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.

Topics: Change, Teacher, Educational, Inspirational Learning, Change Management

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the 'naturals,' the ones who somehow know how to teach.

Topics: Teacher, Retirement, Teaching, Educating Others, Average Person

There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.

Topics: Inspirational, Risk

The most effective way to manage change is to create it.

Topics: Inspirational, Change, Way

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

Topics: Time, Manage, Managing Time, Mastering Time, Time Proverbs

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

Topics: Motivational, Business, Purpose, Customer Experience, Inspirational Service

Culture eats strategy for breakfast,

Topics: Culture, Breakfast, Strategy, Company Culture, Culture Change

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.

Topics: Economy, Values

The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

Topics: Business, Communication, Technology, Information Technology, Internet Technology

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.

Topics: Art, Execution, Commodity

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

Topics: Inspirational, Wise, Innovation, Social Innovation, Innovation And Business

The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.

Topics: Mean, Information, Action

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

Topics: Success, Attention, Persons, Successful Person

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.

Topics: Thinking, Breathing, Games, Missing Something

During periods of discontinuous, abrupt change, the essence of adaptation involves a keen sensitivity to what should be abandoned - not what should be changed or introduced. A willingness to depart from the familiar has distinct survival value.

Topics: Motivational, Essence, Survival

Innovation opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.

Topics: Opportunity, Innovation, Tempest

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

Topics: Future, Trying

You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.

Topics: Positive Thinking, Miracle, Action

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

Topics: Teaching, Leader, Half

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation.

Topics: Success, Stress, Mean

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

Topics: Opportunity, Issues, Social, Global Issues

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

Topics: Educational, Quality, Clients, Customer Experience, Inspirational Service

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.

Topics: Wall, Educational, Important, Inspirational Customer Service, Inspirational Service

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

source: - Peter Ferdinand Drucker (2006). “Classic Drucker: Essential Wisdom of Peter Drucker from the Pages of Harvard Business Review”, p.59, Harvard Business Press

Topics: Greatness, Keys, People

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

Topics: Leader, Followers, Definitions

No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility.

Topics: Responsibility, Decision, Steps

To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.

Topics: Knowledge, Tree, Forests

Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.

Topics: Giving, Quality, Pay

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

Topics: Ideas, Leader, Moral

Production is not the application of tools to materials, but logic to work.

Topics: Tools, Logic, Materials

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.

Topics: Knowing, People, Life Is, Knowing What To Do

The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try.

Topics: Mistake, Failure, Men

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

Topics: Organization, Confusion, Three, Friction, Underperformance

Business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.

Topics: Business, Frustration, Important

Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.

Topics: Distance, Classroom, Campus

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

Topics: Important, Right Thing, Doing The Right Thing

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

Topics: Organization, Symptoms, Meetings

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two and only two functions: Marketing and Innovation. Marketing and Innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.

Topics: Two, Innovation, Marketing, Business Growth

An effective executive builds on strengths - their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates, and on the strength of the situation.

Topics: Situation, Colleagues, Executives

Erroneous assumptions can be disastrous.

Topics: Thinking, Assumption

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

Topics: Integrity, Important, Right Thing

It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.

Topics: Moving, Excellence, Doe

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.

Topics: Time, Unique, Yesterday, Irreplaceable

The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.

Topics: Organization, Friction, Disorder

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.

Topics: Believe, Giving, Quality, Suppliers

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.

Topics: Past, Leader, Inspire

Great wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.

Topics: Data, Marketing, Action, Great Wisdom

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

Topics: Marketing, Selling, Aim, Marketing Plans, Marketing Strategy

Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.

Topics: Answers, Looks, Blank, Wrong Answers, Blank Stares

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.

Topics: Country, Business, Future, Country Roads, Looking To The Future

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations... They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.'

Topics: Expectations, Clerks, Needs

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

Topics: Decision, Choices, Facts

One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.

Topics: Men, Hands

Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.

Topics: Appreciation, Business, Opportunity, Employee Engagement

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

Topics: Inspirational, Teach, Subjects

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service.

Topics: Mean, Opportunity, Entrepreneur

Marketing is not a function, it is the whole business seen from the customer's point of view.

Topics: Business, Views, Marketing

The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.

Topics: Business, Data, Information, Blackouts, Overload

The computer is a moron.

Topics: Work, Technology, Intellectual

Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.

Topics: Strength, Wise, Expectations, Information Knowledge, Knowledge And Information

A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

Topics: Work, Knowledge, Learning

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

Topics: Leadership, Wise, Responsibility, Top Management, Leadership And Management

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

Topics: Asking Questions, Ignorant, Economy, Consultants, Asking Too Many Questions

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

Topics: Education, Wise, Knowledge, Power And Control, Power Of Knowledge

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

Topics: Change, Wise, Future, Knowing The Future, Better Future

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got.

Topics: Change, Country, Trying, Change Management, Change Is Hard

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

Topics: Life, Wise, Funny Inspirational, Project Management, Business Management

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

Topics: Funny, Hilarious, Education, Becoming Obsolete, Importance Of Education

Business has only two basic functions - marketing and innovation.

Topics: Success, Business, Two, Business Growth, Business Innovation

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

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

Topics: People, Busy

Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.

Topics: Behavior

It is willingness of people to give of themselves over and above the demands of the job that distinguishes the great from the merely adequate.

Topics: Jobs, People, Giving

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

Topics: Change, Yesterday, Logic, Managing Change, Change Management

Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.

Topics: Teamwork, Done, Efficiency

The 1st question the effective decision-maker asks is: 'Is this a generic situation or an exception?'

Topics: Decision, Makers, Situation, Generic

The building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

Topics: Personality, Normal, Building, True Leader, Leadership And Change

Organizations are no longer built on force, but on trust.

Topics: Organization, Force

The basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge.

Topics: Knowledge, Mean, Learning, Information Knowledge, Knowledge And Information

One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.

Topics: Change, Manage

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

Topics: People, Tree, Fruit

All economic activity is by definition "high risk." And defending yesterday--that is, not innovating--is far more risky than making tomorrow.

Topics: Yesterday, Risk, Definitions, High Risk

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

Topics: Loyalty, Educational, Marketing, Marketing And Sales, Marketing Campaigns

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.

Topics: Wise, Business, Work

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

Topics: Procrastination, Done, Should, Productive Work, Productive Life

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.

Topics: Children, Men, Self, Change Agent, Non Profit

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.

Topics: Inspirational, Commitment, Accomplishment, Inspirational Commitment, Kept Promises

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

Topics: Strong, Business, Executives

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

Topics: Inspirational, Motivational, Change, Management Motivation, Managing People

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.

Topics: Leadership, Sight, Personality, True Leader, Inspiring Leader

Decisions exist only in the present.

Topics: Decision

There are usually half a dozen right answers to what needs to be done. Yet, unless a person makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing.

Topics: Choices, Needs, Done, Right Answers

Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.

Topics: Innovation, Marketing, Cost

In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise.

Topics: Book, Promise, Students

Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions.

Topics: Skills, Decision, Firsts

The fault is in the system and not in the men.

Topics: Men, Faults, He Man

Vision without execution is delusion. The joy is in the results

Topics: Joy, Vision, Execution

Management has authority only as long as it performs.

Topics: Long, Management, Authority

Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong... And yet, a person can perform only from strength.

Topics: Strength, Thinking, People

It has been said, and only half in jest, that a tough, professionally led union is a great force for improving management performance. It forces the manager to think about what he is doing and to be able to explain his actions and behavior.

Topics: Thinking, Half, Unions

One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.

Topics: Decision, Entrepreneur, Degenerates

Knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant-and perhaps even the only-source of competitive advantage.

Topics: Keys, Management, Economic, Competitive Advantage, Economic Resources

And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.

Topics: Horse, Cities, People

The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves...

Topics: Art, Giving, Ornaments

To make a living is no longer enough. Work also has to make a life.

Topics: Work, Enough

Tomorrow everybody - or practically everybody - will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.

Topics: Meaningful, Jobs, Opportunity, Upper Class

Don't solve problems. Pursue opportunities.

Topics: Opportunity, Problem, Solve

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

Topics: Mistake, Decision, Answers, Right Answers

Miracles are great, but they're so damn unpredictable.

Topics: Sports, Miracle, Unpredictable

Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work - on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself - it must be organized for constant change.

Topics: Change, Organization, Community, Conserving

Technology is not about tools, it deals with how Man works.

Topics: Technology, Men, Tools

The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.

Topics: Institutions, Equipment, Century, Knowledge Workers

Few relationships are as critical to the business enterprise itself as the relationship to government. The manager has responsibility for this relationship as part of his responsibility to the enterprise itself. To a large extent the relationship to government results from what businesses do or fail to do.

Topics: Responsibility, Government, Lobbying

An institution which is financed by a budget - or which enjoys a monopoly which the customer cannot escape - is rewarded for what it deserves rather than what it earns. It is paid for 'good intentions' and 'programs'. It is paid for not alienating important constituents rather than satisfying any one group. It is misdirected by the way it is being paid into defining performance and results as what will produce the budget rather than as what will produce contribution.

Topics: Important, Groups, Way

The task of management is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.

Topics: People, Tasks, Joints

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

Topics: Measuring, Measure For Measure

Most organizations staff their problems & starve their opportunities.

Topics: Opportunity, Organization, Problem

Objectives can be compared to a compass bearing by which a ship navigates. A compass bearing is firm, but in actual navigation, a ship may veer off its course for many miles. Without a compass bearing, a ship would neither find its port nor be able to estimate the time required to get there.

Topics: May, Able, Ships, Navigate, Navigation

The fundamental reality for every worker, from sweeper to executive vice-president, is the eight hours or so that he spends on the job . In our society of organizations, it is the job through which the great majority has access to achievement, to fulfillment, and to community.

Topics: Jobs, Reality, Eight, Sweepers

It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people: a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are told.

Topics: Jobs, Order, Class

Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people -- and allow people to place themselves -- according to their strengths.

Topics: Jobs, Organization, People

Every first-rate editor I have ever heard of reads, edits and rewrites every word that goes into his publication.... Good editors are not 'permissive'; they do not let their colleagues do 'their thing'; they make sure that everybody does the 'paper's thing.' A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done.

Topics: Writing, Cutting, Thinking

One can either work or meet. One cannot do both at the same time.

It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.

Topics: Priorities

A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.

Topics: Country, Tasks, Management

There is no reason to believe that the people who staff the managerial and professional positions in our service institutions are any less qualified, any less competent or honest, or any less hard-working than the men who manage businesses. Conversely, there is no reason to believe that business managers, put in control of service institutions, would do better than the 'bureaucrats'. Indeed, we know that they immediately become bureaucrats themselves.

Topics: Believe, Hard Work, Men, Competent

Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.

Topics: Ideas, Listening, Asking

To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.

Topics: Purpose, Missions

When a resource is scarce, you increase its yield.

Topics: Motivational, Yield, Resources

We can't make people better by trying to eliminate their weaknesses, but we can help then perform better by building on their strengths.

Topics: People, Trying, Weakness

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

Topics: Organization, People, Social

We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad. We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order. We see change as being order itself-indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one.

Topics: Moving, Order, Today, Axioms

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.

Topics: Loyalty, Attitude, Men, Abuse Of Power, Usurpation

Never underrate the boss! The boss may look illiterate. He may look stupid. But there is no risk at all in overrating a boss. If you underrate him he will bitterly resent it or impute to you the deficiency in brains and knowledge you imputed to him.

Topics: Stupid, Boss, Risk

If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the "bourgeois" under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource.

Topics: Knights, Age, Embodiment, Educated Person

For the social ecologist language is not "communication." It is not just "message." It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communication. Social ecologists need not be "great" writers; but they have to be respectful writers, caring writers.

Topics: Communication, Caring, Community

Increasingly, politics is not about "who gets what, when, how" but about values, each of them considered to be absolute. Politics is about "the right to life." It is about the environment. It is about gaining equality for groups alleged to be oppressed. None of these issues is economic. All are fundamentally moral.

Topics: Issues, Groups, Moral

The postwar WWII GI Bill of Rights-and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans-signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century. We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world.

Topics: Rights, America, Political

All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.

Topics: Community, Care, Common

Unless a decision has degenerated into work, it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.

Topics: Decision, Good Intentions, Intention

Listening is not a skill; it is a discipline.

Topics: Skills, Discipline, Listening

...because knowledge rapidly deteriorates unless it is used constantly, maintaining within an organization an activity that is used only intermittently guarantees incompetence.

Topics: Organization, Maintaining, Guarantees

Making changes to better appeal to customer is INNOVATION.

Topics: Innovation, Making Changes, Appeals

The computer, being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data.

Topics: Data, Computer, Moron

The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is ... to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker

Topics: Important, Needs, Management, Knowledge Workers, Important Contributions

Look at government programs for the past fifty years. Every single one - except warfare - achieved the exact opposite of its announced goal.

Topics: Past, Years, Opposites, Government Programs

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

Topics: Focus, Cost, May, Aggravated

We always remember best the irrelevant.

Topics: Remember, Irrelevant

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.

Topics: Jobs, People

If a manager spends more than 10 percent of his time on "human relations" the group is probably too large.

Topics: Groups, Relation, Humans

Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise.

Topics: Resources, Enterprise

Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!

Topics: Men, Chance, Modern, Modern Man, Profit Motive

Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese.

Topics: Decision, World, Making Decisions

Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.

Topics: Cancer, Growth, Add

If a government commission had worked on the horse, you would have the first horse that could operate its knee joint in both directions. The trouble is it couldn't have stood up.

Topics: Horse, Government, Knees

Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything.

Topics: Hard Times, Elephants, Cockroaches

Effective people are not problem minded; they're opportunity-minded.  They feed opportunities and starve problems.  They think preventively.

Topics: Leadership, Opportunity, Thinking

But innovation is more than a new method. It is a new view of the universe, as one of risk rather than of chance or of certainty. It is a new view of man's role in the universe; he creates order by taking risks. And this means that innovation, rather than being an assertion of human power, is an acceptance of human responsibility.

Topics: Change, Mean, Responsibility, Assertion

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

Topics: Ideas, Firm

Any time I have seen someone accomplishing something magnificent, they have been a monomaniac with a mission. A single-minded individual with a passion.

Topics: Passion, Individual, Missions, Accomplishing Something

We've spent the last 30 years focusing on the T in IT, and we'll spend the next 30 years focusing on the I.

Topics: Years, Next, Lasts

Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.

Topics: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship

In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a non- world.

Topics: Education, School, World, Business School

Knowledge applied is productivity.

Topics: Productivity

As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel.

Topics: Business, Ideas, People

There is the general belief that the corporation income tax is a tax on the "rich" and on the "fat cats." But with pension funds owning 30% of American large business-and soon to own 50%-the corporation income tax, in effect, eases the load on those in top income brackets and penalizes the beneficiaries of pension funds.

Topics: Cat, Ease, Politics, Pension

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 the hospital, such as doctors and nurses.

Topics: Doctors, People, Nurse, Doctors And Nurses, Health Care Costs

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