Quotes from Peter Drucker

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

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

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.

Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.

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.

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

The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.

There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.

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.

You can't manage what you can't measure.

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

The best way to predict your future is to create it

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old

No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.

There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.

The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

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.

What's measured improves

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

Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.

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