Peter Drucker People Quotations

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work

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.

People who don't take risks generally make about 2 big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about 2 big mistakes a year.

People learn the most when teaching others.

Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

There's no such thing as knowledge management; there are only knowledgeable people. Information only becomes knowledge in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it.

The moment people talk of "implementing" instead of "doing," and of "finalizing" instead of "finishing," the organization is already running a fever.

what's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There is no excuse for it. No justification. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we will pay a heavy price for it.

One reason for the tremendous increase in health-care costs in the U.S. is managerial neglect of the "hotel services" by the people who dominate the hospital, such as doctors and nurses.

Once a year ask the boss, "What do I or my people do that helps you to do your job?" and "What do I or my people do that hampers you?

A manager sets objectives - A manager organizes - A manager motivates and communicates - A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures - A manager develops people .

And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.

I'm better about things than about people. I'm more interested in people, but I'm better at ideas.

No business can do everything. Even if it has the money, it will never have enough good people. It has to set priorities. The worst thing to do is a little bit of everything. This makes sure that nothing is being accomplished. It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.

I would hope that American managers-indeed, managers worldwide-continue to appreciate what I have been saying almost from day one: that management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege, that it is much more than "making deals." Management affects people and their lives.

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.

People are effective because they say 'no,' because they say, 'this isn't for me.'

The task of management is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.

To succeed in this new world, we will have to learn, first, who we are. Few people, even highly successful people, can answer the questions, Do you know what you're good at? Do you know what you need to learn so that you get the full benefit of your strengths? Few have even asked themselves these questions.

Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong... And yet, a person can perform only from strength.

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

The great mystery isn't that people do things badly but that they occasionally do a few things well. The only thing that is universal is incompetence. Strength is always specific! Nobody ever commented, for example, that the great violinist Jascha Heifetz probably couldn't play the trumpet very well.

The ultimate resource in economic development is people. It is people, not capital or raw materials that develop an economy.

Working with people is difficult, but not impossible.

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

People who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs.

Successful people know they need to get many things done-and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate their time and energy on doing one thing at a time-and on doing first things firs.

The success and ultimately the survival of every business, large or small, depends in the last analysis on its ability to develop people. This ability is not measured by any of our conventional yardsticks of economic success; yet, is the final measurement.

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.

The productivity of people requires continuous learning, as the Japanese have taught us. It requires adoption in the West of the specific Japanese Zen concept where one learns to do better what one already does well.

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.

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

We can't make people better by trying to eliminate their weaknesses, but we can help then perform better by building on their strengths.

The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.

This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work... or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work - still abysmally low - will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people.

The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, "If we assign this general to lead this base, what do we expect him to accomplish?"

Fortunately or unfortunately, the one predictable thing in any organization is the crisis. That always comes. That's when you do depend on the leader: The job of the leader is to build an organization that is battle-ready, that has high morale, that knows how to behave, that trusts itself, and where people trust one another.

The job of a professional manager is not to like people. It is not to change people. It is to put their strengths to work.

Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people -- and allow people to place themselves -- according to their strengths.

People alone of all the resources can grow and develop.

One does not "manage" people. The task is to lead people.

Any organisation develops people; it either forms them or deforms them.

Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.

I no longer think that learning how to manage people, especially subordinates, is the most important for executives to learn. I am teaching above all else, how to manage oneself.

What people in business think they know about the customer and market is likely to be more wrong than right...the customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him.

The organization is, above all, social. It is people.

The fruit of your work grows on other people's trees

There are two types of people in the business community: those who produce results and those who give you reasons why they didn't.

It's amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed.

Morale in an organization does not mean that “people get along together”; the test is performance not conformance.

Strong people have strong weaknesses.

It is willingness of people to give of themselves over and above the demands of the job that distinguishes the great from the merely adequate.

A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.

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.

The key to greatness is to look for people's potential and spend time developing it.