Top 500 Peter F. Drucker Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.”

— Peter F. Drucker

452. “The most critical case in a corporation, especially a big one, is when everything goes well, when you have accomplished your objectives. When the temptation is to work twice as hard instead of saying, “We have accomplished our objectives, we have to think again.””

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

455. “We always remember best the irrelevant.”

— Peter F. Drucker

456. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

457. “The subordinate’s job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual.”

— Peter F. Drucker

458. “Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity that causes it, this is therefore the best-indeed the only truly good-solution.”

— Peter F. Drucker

459. “When Henry Ford said, “The customer can have a car in any color as long as it’s black,” he was not joking.”

— Peter F. Drucker

460. “The computer actually may have aggravated management’s degenerative tendency to focus inward on costs.”

— Peter F. Drucker

461. “Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.”

— Peter F. Drucker

462. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

463. “We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.”

— Peter F. Drucker

464. “Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates a resource. There is no such thing as a ‘resource’ until man finds a use for something in nature and thus endows it with economic value. Until then, every plant is a weed and every mineral just another rock.”

— Peter F. Drucker

465. “We have tried to substitute mass for purpose. We have tried to regain military potency of defense by making it gigantic, unwieldy, complex. It never works.”

— Peter F. Drucker

466. “Measuring requires, first and foremost, analytical ability. But it also demands that measurement be used to make self-control possible, rather than abused to control people from the outside and above – that is, to dominate them.”

— Peter F. Drucker

467. “I’m a writer. I could not or would not ever run a business. I don’t even have a secretary. And contrary to some of the stereotypes, entrepreneurs are not loners. I am.”

— Peter F. Drucker

468. “I have no interest in celebrities. If all the superrich disappeared, the world economy would not even notice. The superrich are irrelevant to the economy.”

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

470. “The healthier a new venture and the faster it grows, the more financial feeding it requires.”

— Peter F. Drucker

471. “Mother Teresa’s numerical results were not her greatest contribution. Instead, she made the world-and especially India-conscious of compassion.”

— Peter F. Drucker

472. “The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.”

— Peter F. Drucker

473. “The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.”

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

475. “One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work.”

— Peter F. Drucker

476. “What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can’t be very good.”

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

479. “Of all the important pieces of self-knowledge, understanding how you learn is the easiest to acquire.”

— Peter F. Drucker

480. “There are no creeds in mathematics.”

— Peter F. Drucker

481. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

482. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

483. “A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong” – but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.”

— Peter F. Drucker

484. “I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information.”

— Peter F. Drucker

485. “In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers, is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power.”

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

487. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

488. “Entrepreneurial management in the new venture has four requirements: It requires, first, a focus on the market. It requires, second, financial foresight, and especially planning for cash flow and capital needs ahead. It requires, third, building a top management team long before the new venture actually needs one and long before it can actually afford one. And finally, it requires of the founding entrepreneur a decision in respect to his or her own role, area of work, and relationships.”

— Peter F. Drucker

489. “If you think training is expensive, try ignorance.”

— Peter F. Drucker

490. “The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader’s charisma. What matters is the leader’s mission.”

— Peter F. Drucker

491. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

492. “If a business is to be considered a continuous process, instead of a series of disjointed stop-and-go events, then the economic universe in which a business operates-and all the major events within it-must have rhyme, rhythm, or reason.”

— Peter F. Drucker

493. “Any existing organization, whether a business, a church, a labor union, or a hospital, goes down fast if it does not innovate. Conversely, any new organization, whether a business, a church, a labor union, or a hospital, collapses if it does not manage. Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures.”

— Peter F. Drucker

494. “The truly important events on the outside are not the trends. They are changes in the trends. These determine ultimately success or failure of an organization and its efforts. Such changes, however, have to be perceived; they cannot be counted, defined, or classified. The classifications still produce the expected figures – as they did for the Edsel. But the figures no longer correspond to actual behavior.”

— Peter F. Drucker

495. “A recurrent crisis should always have been foreseen. It can therefore either be prevented or reduced to a routine which clerks can manage. The definition of a “routine” is that it makes unskilled people without judgment capable of doing what it took near-genius to do before; for a routine puts down in systematic, step-by-step form what a very able man learned in surmounting yesterday’s crisis. The recurrent crisis is not confined to the lower levels of an organization. It afflicts everyone.”

— Peter F. Drucker

496. “In a rural society communities are “given” for the individual. Community is a fact, whether family or religion, social class or caste.”

— Peter F. Drucker

497. “Organizationally what is required – and evolving – is systems management.”

— Peter F. Drucker

498. “When the business grows, the person who founded it is incredibly busy. Rapid growth puts an enormous strain on a business. You outgrow your production facilities. You outgrow your management capabilities.”

— Peter F. Drucker

499. “Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.”

— Peter F. Drucker

500. “A business enterprise must continue beyond the lifetime of the individual or of the generation to be capable of producing its contributions to economy and to society.”

— Peter F. Drucker