Quotes from Peter F. Drucker

1. Innovation is work. It requires knowledge. It often requires great ingenuity. There are clearly people who are more talented innovators than the rest of us. Also, innovators rarely work in more than one area. For all his tremendous innovative capacity, Edison worked only in the electrical field. And an innovator in financial areas, Citibank in New York, for instance, is unlikely to embark on innovations in retailing or health care.

In actual practice this distinction makes no sense whatever. An enterprise, whether a business or any other institution, that does not innovate and does not engage in entrepreneurship will not survive long.

An organization is an organ of society and fulfills itself by the contribution it makes to the outside environment.

Good intentions are no excuse for incompetence. And the manager who believes that social consciousness is a substitute for managing his business—or his hospital or his university—so that it produces the results for the sake of which it exists, is either a fool or a knave or both.

But everyone who can face up to decision making can learn to be an entrepreneur and to behave entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurship, then, is behaviour rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.

Executives may become blind to everything that is perception (i.e., event) rather than fact (i.e., after the event).

He knows that the test of organization is not genius. It is its capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance.

Drucker highlights two common ingredients: preparation with a clear purpose in mind ("why are we having this meeting?") and disciplined follow-up.

A central economic problem of developed societies during the next twenty or thirty years is surely going to be capital formation; only in Japan is it still adequate for the economy's needs. We therefore can ill afford to have activities conducted as 'non-profit', that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.

If it were a decision today to start something you are already in (to enter a business, to hire a person, to institute a policy, to launch a project, etc.), would you? If not, then why do you persist?

People, I realized, were what I valued, and I saw no point in being the richest man in the cemetery.

The question is: how to be useful!" A great teacher can change your life in thirty seconds.

And you seem to spend a lot of energy on the question of how to be successful. But that is the wrong question." He paused, then like the Zen master thwacking the table with a bamboo stick: "The question is: how to be useful!" A great teacher can change your life in thirty seconds.

He was, in the end, the highest level of what a teacher can be: a role model of the very ideas he taught, a walking testament to his teachings in the tremendous lasting effect of his own life.

Effectiveness as an executive demands doing certain—and fairly simple—things.

Effectiveness, in other words, is a habit; that is, a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned.

Effective executives know where their time goes.

Now the effectiveness of the individual depends increasingly on his or her ability to be effective in an organization, to be effective as an executive.

But innovation and change make inordinate time demands on the executive. All one can think and do in a short time is to think what one already knows and to do as one has always done.

The first two practices gave them the knowledge they needed. The next four helped them convert this knowledge into effective action. The last two ensured that the whole organization felt responsible and accountable.

Note that the question is not "What do I want to do?" Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success.

Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work.

Effective executives build on strengths

The focus on contribution counteracts one of the basic problems of the executive: the confusion and chaos of events and their failure to indicate by themselves which is meaningful and which is merely "noise." The focus on contribution imposes an organizing principle. It imposes relevance on events.