Top 500 Peter F. Drucker Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The days of the ‘intuitive’ manager are numbered.”

— Peter F. Drucker

152. “Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.”

— Peter F. Drucker

153. “Universities won’t survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.”

— Peter F. Drucker

154. “By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.”

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

156. “A business is not defined by its name, statutes, or articles of incorporation. It is defined by the business mission. Only a clear definition of the mission and purpose of the organization makes possible clear and realistic business objectives.”

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

159. “The question that faces the strategic decision maker is not what his organisation should do tomorrow. It is, what do we have to do today to be ready for an uncertain tomorrow?”

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

162. “The need to manage oneself is creating a revolution in human affairs.”

— Peter F. Drucker

163. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

164. “Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself – not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.”

— Peter F. Drucker

165. “Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not bounced.”

— Peter F. Drucker

166. “There is no perfect strategic decision. One always has to pay a price. One always has to balance conflicting objectives, conflicting opinions, and conflicting priorities. The best strategic decision is only an approximation – and a risk.”

— Peter F. Drucker

167. “Knowledge is the source of Wealth. Applied to tasks we already know, it becomes Productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes Innovation...”

— Peter F. Drucker

168. “As a manager you’re paid to be uncomfortable. If you’re comfortable, it’s a sure sign you’re doing things wrong.”

— Peter F. Drucker

169. “The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it’s dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it.”

— Peter F. Drucker

170. “Objectives are not commands; they are commitments.”

— Peter F. Drucker

171. “An effective executive builds on strengths – their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates, and on the strength of the situation.”

— Peter F. Drucker

172. “Leadership is defined by results not attributes.”

— Peter F. Drucker

173. “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. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.”

— Peter F. Drucker

174. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

175. “Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.”

— Peter F. Drucker

176. “Use feedback analysis to identify your strengths. Then go to work on improving your strengths. Identify and eliminate bad habits that hinder the full development of your strengths. Figure out what you should do and do it. Finally, decide what you should not do.”

— Peter F. Drucker

177. “Strong people have strong weaknesses.”

— Peter F. Drucker

178. “Progress is obtained only by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. When you solve problems, all you do is guarantee a return to normalcy.”

— Peter F. Drucker

179. “The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago.”

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

181. “The key to greatness is to look for people’s potential and spend time developing it.”

— Peter F. Drucker

182. “Most leaders don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.”

— Peter F. Drucker

183. “What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady and continuous.”

— Peter F. Drucker

184. “You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers – because without trust, they won’t fight.”

— Peter F. Drucker

185. “The fruit of your work grows on other people’s trees.”

— Peter F. Drucker

186. “Business is society’s change agent.”

— Peter F. Drucker

187. “When it rains manna from heaven, some people put up an umbrella. Others reach for a big spoon.”

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

190. “There’s an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.”

— Peter F. Drucker

191. “All good strategy eventually degenerates into work.”

— Peter F. Drucker

192. “Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant.”

— Peter F. Drucker

193. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

194. “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

— Peter F. Drucker

195. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

196. “Work is an extension of personality. It is achievement. It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself, measures his worth, and his humanity.”

— Peter F. Drucker

197. “Above all, innovation is not invention. It is a term of economics rather than of technology.”

— Peter F. Drucker

198. “Erroneous assumptions can be disastrous.”

— Peter F. Drucker

199. “The leader sees leadership as responsibility rather than as rank and privilege.”

— Peter F. Drucker

200. “The final test of greatness in a CEO is how well he chooses a successor and whether he can step aside and let the successor run the company.”

— Peter F. Drucker