Some Quotes By Peter Drucker, Mostly about General Managemnet

“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.”

“Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.”

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

“The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”
“Meetings are a symptom of bad organization, the fewer meetings the better.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right”

“Leaders shouldn't attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can't compromise.”

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

“Decision making is the specific executive task.”

“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.”

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

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

“Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven't.”

“We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is writing books about it.”

“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.”

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

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

“What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that's another matter.”

“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.”

“Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.”

“Leadership is not magnetic personality /that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not making friends and influencing people /that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”

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

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

“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.”

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