Peter Drucker Leadership Quotations

People learn the most when teaching others.

If you want it, measure it. If you can't measure it, forget it.

The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. She therefore makes sure she puts into the leadership position, into the standard-setting, the performance-making position the person who has the strength to do the outstanding pacesetting job. This always requires focus on the one strength of a person and dismissal of weaknesses as irrelevant unless they hamper the full deployment of the available strength.

No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.

Leaders grow; they are not made.

The leader sees leadership as responsibility rather than as rank and privilege.

The person who will make the greatest contribution to a company is the mature person-and you cannot have maturity if you have no life or interest outside the job.

Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.

Effective people are not problem minded; they're opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively.

Leadership is lifting a person's vision to high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

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

The building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.

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

Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

Leadership is defined by results not attributes.

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.

Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.

Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

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.

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

Management is doing a thing right; leadership is doing the right things.

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.