Quotes from Peter Drucker

The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.

Do what you do best, and outsource the rest.

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.

The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it's dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it.

It's more important to do the right thing than to do things right.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.

Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will be taken over by a Central government

No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.

The purpose of information is not knowledge. It is being able to take the right action.

Knowledge is the source of Wealth. Applied to tasks we already know, it becomes Productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes Innovation.

In todays economy, the most important resource is no longer labor, capital or land; it is knowledge

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.

The essence of management is to make knowledge productive.

...because knowledge rapidly deteriorates unless it is used constantly, maintaining within an organization an activity that is used only intermittently guarantees incompetence.

A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.

Managers are agents of transformation, converting the workforce in developed countries from one of manual workers to one of highly educated knowledge workers.

Knowledge applied is productivity.

Knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant-and perhaps even the only-source of competitive advantage.

Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody - either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action.

In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.

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