Peter F. Drucker
Austrian-American management thinker, 1909-2005
54 quotes.
Quotes by Peter F. Drucker
- A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.
- A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant - and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates
- A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness.
- A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.
- Business has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation.
- Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
- Do first things first, and second things not at all.
- Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.
- Don't solve problems. Pursue opportunities.
- Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.
- Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.
- Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.
- Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions.
- Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
- If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
- If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.
- Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.
- It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.
- It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.
- Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
- Long-range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.
- No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.
- One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.
- Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.
- Our job in life is to make a positive difference, not prove we're right.
- Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
- Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.
- Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
- Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.
- So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
- Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.
- The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
- The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make - for the more new things he will try.
- The fault is in the system and not in the men.
- The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic.
- The key to greatness is to look for people's potential and spend time developing it.
- The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.
- The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it.
- The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.
- The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.