Quotes from Peter Drucker

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

Production is not the application of tools to materials, but logic to work.

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

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.

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

The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you've got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out.

[T]hroughout the ages to be educated meant to be unproductive.... our word "school" - and its equivalent in all European languages - derives from a Greek word meaning "leisure.

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.

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.

Do the right things instead of trying to do everything right.

Unless a decision has degenerated into work, it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.

All good strategy eventually degenerates into work.

My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.

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.

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

Manners are the lubricating oil of an organization. It is a law of nature that two moving bodies in contact with each other create friction. This is as true for human beings as it is for inanimate objects.

Work is an extension of personality. It is achievement. It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself, measures his worth, and his humanity.

One can either work or meet. One cannot do both at the same time.

To improve communications, work not on the utter, but the recipient.

Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.

Financial "synergy" is a will-o'-the-wisp.It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice.

The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.

In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise.