Quotes from Peter F. Drucker

The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.

And productivity for the knowledge worker means the ability to get the right things done. It means effectiveness.

Management by drive, like management by 'bellows and meat ax,' is a sure sign of confusion. It is an admission of incompetence. It is a sign that management does not know how to plan. But, above all, it is a sign that the company does not know what to expect of its managers – that, not knowing how to direct them, it misdirects them.

Abandon what is about to be obsolete, develop a system to exploit your successes, and develop a systematic approach to innovation.

The responsibility is always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot.

First-rate engineers, for instance, tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human beings, they believe, are much too disorderly for the good engineering mind. Human resources professionals, by contrast, often pride themselves on their ignorance of elementary accounting or of quantitative methods altogether. But taking pride in such ignorance is self-defeating. Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.

The entrepreneur,' said the French economist J. B. Say around 1800, 'shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.' But Say's definition does not tell us who this 'entrepreneur' is. And since Say coined the term almost two hundred years ago, there has been total confusion over the definitions of 'entrepreneur' and

If there is one point on which all authorities on Japan are in agreement, it is that Japanese institutions, whether business or government agencies, make decisions by consensus. The Japanese, we are told, debate a proposed decision throughout the organization until there is agreement on it. And only then do they make the decision.

Executives of necessity live and work within an organization. Unless they make conscious efforts to perceive the outside, the inside may blind them to the true reality.

Nothing succeeds like concentration on the right business. And if the company is not in the right business, diversification will no more make it a "growth company," than a man with a broken hip will be restored to health, by being taken on a twenty-mile forced march with an eighty-pound pack on his shoulders.

Planning and doing are separate parts of the same job; they are not separate jobs. There is no work that can be performed effectively unless it contains elements of both. One

Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results. And for these, the size of the group and the magnitude of the managerial job are not even symptoms.

Or—most tricky of all—a boss whom you admire fails in the crucial duty of a boss: to support, foster, and promote capable subordinates.

Still, entrepreneurial strategy remains the decision-making area of entrepreneurship and therefore the risk-taking one. It is by no means hunch or gamble. But it also is not precisely science. Rather, it is judgement.

The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers' needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager's business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.

I have called "executives" those knowledge workers, managers, or individual professionals who are expected by virtue of their position or their knowledge to make decisions in the normal course of their work that have significant impact on the performance and results of the whole.

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only these two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.

Indeed, everyone familiar with business today has seen situations in which a manager's attempt to avoid misdirection through changing his manners has converted a fairly satisfactory relationship into a nightmare of embarrassment and misunderstanding. The manager himself becomes so self-conscious as to lose all easy relationship with his men. And the men in turn react with: "So help us, the old man has read a book; we used to know what he wanted of us, now ,we have to guess.

During the process that precedes the decision, no mention is made of what the answer might be. This is done so that people will not be forced to take sides; once they have taken sides, a decision would be a victory for one side and a defeat for the other. Thus the whole process is focused on finding out what the decision is really about, not what the decision should be. Its result is a meeting of the minds that there is (or is not) a need for a change in behavior.

entrepreneurship is by no means limited to the economic sphere although the term originated there. It pertains to all activities of human beings other than those one might term "existential" rather than "social." And we now know that there is little difference between entrepreneurship whatever the sphere.

Modern management and modern enterprise could not exist without the knowledge base that developed societies have built. But equally, it is management, and management alone, that makes effective all this knowledge and these knowledgeable people. The emergence of management has converted knowledge from social ornament and luxury into the true capital of any economy. Not

Autonomous managers in a federal structure cannot be content with "reports." They must think through what top management needs to understand. And they must accept the responsibility for educating their top management.

Concept of the Corporation.

problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.