Top 500 Peter F. Drucker Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “The only industries that function well are the industries that take responsibility for training. The Japanese, you know, assume that when you first come to work you know absolutely nothing. School isn’t preparation for work and never was.”

— Peter F. Drucker

352. “Schools will change more in the next 30 years than they have since the invention of the printed book.”

— Peter F. Drucker

353. “Managers are agents of transformation, converting the workforce in developed countries from one of manual workers to one of highly educated knowledge workers.”

— Peter F. Drucker

354. “Some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I’ve worked with over a sixty-five-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses.”

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

357. “Decisions exist only in the present.”

— Peter F. Drucker

358. “Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results.”

— Peter F. Drucker

359. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

360. “The action plan is a statement of intentions rather than a commitment. It must not become a straitjacket. It should be revised often, because every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.”

— Peter F. Drucker

361. “People are effective because they say ‘no,’ because they say, ‘this isn’t for me.’”

— Peter F. Drucker

362. “No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real.”

— Peter F. Drucker

363. “What makes demographics such a rewarding opportunity for the entrepreneur is precisely its neglect by decision makers, whether businessmen, public-service staffs, or governmental policymakers. They still cling to the assumption that demographics do not change – or do not change fast. Indeed, they reject even the plainest evidence of demographic changes.”

— Peter F. Drucker

364. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

365. “Teamwork is neither “good” nor “desirable.” It is a fact. Wherever people work together or play together they do so as a team. Which team to use for what purpose is a crucial, difficult and risky decision that is even harder to unmake. Managements have yet to learn how to make it.”

— Peter F. Drucker

366. “To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.”

— Peter F. Drucker

367. “By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else. Here, therefore, is the one area where weakness is a disqualification by itself rather than a limitation on performance capacity and strength.”

— Peter F. Drucker

368. “Tomorrow always arrives. It is always different. And even the mightiest company is in trouble if it has not worked on the future. Being surprised by what happens is a risk that even the largest and richest company cannot afford, and even the smallest business need not run.”

— Peter F. Drucker

369. “If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.”

— Peter F. Drucker

370. “If general perception changes from seeing the glass as ‘half-full’ to seeing it as ‘half empty’ there are major innovative opportunities.”

— Peter F. Drucker

371. “No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.”

— Peter F. Drucker

372. “Follow these five decision steps when hiring someone: Understand the job, consider three to five people, study candidates performance records to find their strengths, talk to the candidates’ colleagues about them, and once hired, explain the assignment to the new employee.”

— Peter F. Drucker

373. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

374. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

375. “The monomaniac is unlikely to succeed. Most leave only their bleached bones in the roadless desert. But the rest of us, with our multiple interests instead of a single mission, are certain to fail and have no impact at all.”

— Peter F. Drucker

376. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

377. “I have been saying for many years that we are using the word ‘guru’ only because ‘charlatan’ is too long to fit into a headline.”

— Peter F. Drucker

378. “Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.”

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

380. “Far too much reorganization goes on all the time. Organizitis is like a spastic colon.”

— Peter F. Drucker

381. “An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.”

— Peter F. Drucker

382. “A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.”

— Peter F. Drucker

383. “If something fails despite being carefully planned, carefully designed, and conscientiously executed, that failure often bespeaks underlying change and, with it, opportunity.”

— Peter F. Drucker

384. “Institutions mistake good intentions for objectives. They say “health care”; that’s an intention, not an objective.”

— Peter F. Drucker

385. “Shoes are real. Money is an end result.”

— Peter F. Drucker

386. “One either meets or one works.”

— Peter F. Drucker

387. “The company is not and must never claim to be home, family, religion, life or fate for the individual. It must never interfere in his private life or his citizenship. He is tied to the company through a voluntary and cancellable employment contract, not through some mystical or indissoluble bond.”

— Peter F. Drucker

388. “The single minded ones, the monomaniacs, are the only true achievers.”

— Peter F. Drucker

389. “The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.”

— Peter F. Drucker

390. “The enterprise, by definition, must be capable of producing more or better than all the resources that comprise it.”

— Peter F. Drucker

391. “To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.”

— Peter F. Drucker

392. “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.”

— Peter F. Drucker

393. “Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.”

— Peter F. Drucker

394. “Culture eats Christianity for breakfast.”

— Peter F. Drucker

395. “Understanding our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong – these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of knowledge workers.”

— Peter F. Drucker

396. “Most of what you hear about entrepreneurshi p is all wrong. It’s not magic; it’s not mysterious; and it has nothing to do with genes. It’s a discipline and, like any discipline, it can be learned.”

— Peter F. Drucker

397. “The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it.”

— Peter F. Drucker

398. “Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.”

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

400. “There is one qualification the manager cannot acquire but must bring to the task. It is not genius; it is character.”

— Peter F. Drucker