Peter Drucker (1909-2005)

Quotes

• Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard.

• The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.

• Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.

• 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.

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

• Marketing is a fashionable term. The sales manager becomes a marketing vice president. But a gravedigger is still a gravedigger even when it is called a mortician - only the price of the burial goes up.

• One either meets or one works.

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

• Stock option plans reward the executive for doing the wrong thing. Instead of asking, 'Are we making the right decision?' he asks, 'How did we close today?' It is encouragement to loot the corporation.

• Far too many people—especially people with great expertise in one area—are contemptuous of knowledge in other areas or believe that being bright is a substitute for knowledge.

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

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

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

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

• Long-range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.

• The computer is a moron.

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

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

• "Management" means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folklore and superstition, and of cooperation for force. . .

• 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.