Peter Drucker Risk Quotations

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

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.

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.

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

Most innovators are successful to the extent to which they define risks and confine them.

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.

Promotion should not be more important than accomplishment, or avoiding instability more important than taking the right risk.

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.

All economic activity is by definition "high risk." And defending yesterday--that is, not innovating--is far more risky than making tomorrow.

There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.