Quotes from Peter F. Drucker

Whether the responsibility for innovation rests with the chief executive officer, with another member of top management, or with a separate component, whether it is a full-time assignment or part of an executive's responsibilities, it should always be set up and recognized both as a separate responsibility and as a responsibility of top management. And it should always include the systematic and purposeful search for innovative opportunities.

No member will make a decision with regard to a matter for which he does not have primary responsibility. Should such a matter be brought to him, he will refer it to the colleague whose primary responsibility it is. Indeed it is a wise precaution for members of the top-management team not even to have an opinion on matters that are not within their own areas of primary responsibility.

It might be asked, are all these policies and practices necessary? Don't they interfere with the entrepreneurial spirit and stifle creativity? And cannot a business be entrepreneurial without such policies and practices? The answer is, perhaps, but neither very successfully nor for very long.

Far more often, the unexpected success is simply not seen at all. Nobody pays any attention to it. Hence, nobody exploits it, with the inevitable result that the competitor runs with it and reaps the rewards.

The task of an executive is not to change human beings. Rather, as the Bible tells us in the parable of the Talents, the task is to multiply performance capacity of the whole by putting to use whatever strength, whatever health, whatever aspiration there is in individuals.

To exploit the opportunity for innovation offered by unexpected success requires analysis. Unexpected success is a symptom. But a symptom of what? The underlying phenomenon may be nothing more than a limitation on our own vision, knowledge, and understanding.

Toshiba and Hitachi made better sets at the time, only they showed them on the Ginza in Tokyo and in the big-city department stores, making it pretty clear that farmers were not particularly welcome in such elegant surroundings. Matsushita went to the farmers and sold its televisions door-to-door, something no one in Japan had ever done before for anything more expensive than cotton pants or aprons.

Managements must look at every unexpected success with the questions: (1) What would it mean to us if we exploited it? (2) Where could it lead us? (3) What would we have to do to convert it into an opportunity? And (4) How do we go about it? This means, first, that managements need to set aside specific time in which to discuss unexpected successes; and second, that someone should always be designated to analyse an unexpected success and to think through how it could be exploited.

But a company which wants economic results has to have leadership in something of real value to a customer or market. It may be in one narrow but important aspect of the product line, it may be in its service, it may be in its distribution, or it may be in its ability to convert ideas into salable products on the market speedily and at low cost.

They are, therefore, not overly impressed by speed in decision-making. Rather they consider virtuosity in manipulating a great many variables a symptom of sloppy thinking. They want to know what the decision is all about and what the underlying realities are which it has to satisfy. They want impact rather than technique, they want to be sound rather than clever.

The knowledge worker is not poverty-prone. He is in danger of alienation, to use the fashionable word for boredom, frustration, and silent despair.

An incongruity is a discrepancy, a dissonance, between what is and what 'ought' to be, or between what is and what everybody assumes it to be.

We may not understand the reason for it; indeed, we often cannot figure it out. Still, an incongruity is a symptom of an opportunity to innovate.

There are several kinds of incongruity: – An incongruity between the economic realities of an industry (or of a public-service area); – An incongruity between the reality of an industry (or of a public-service area) and the assumptions about it; – An incongruity between the efforts of an industry (or a public-service area) and the values and expectations of its customers; – An internal incongruity within the rhythm or the logic of a process.

The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner's job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one's own property.

Anyone who knows Western businesses, government agencies, or educational institutions knows that their managers make far too many small decisions as a rule. And nothing causes as much trouble in an organization as a lot of small decisions.

Restructuring a job usually means restructuring a score of jobs, moving people around, and upsetting everybody. There is one exception: the exceedingly rare, truly exceptional man for whose sake the rule should be broken.

Nothing is further from the truth than the hoary myth of the Populists that the small man is being squeezed out of the marketplace by the giants. The innovative growth companies of the last twenty-five years all started as small businesses. And by and large the small businesses have done far better than the giants.

Even today few businessmen understand that research, to be productive, has to be the "disorganizer," the creator of a different future and the enemy of today. In most industrial laboratories, "defensive research" aimed at perpetuating today, predominates.

el efectivo hombre de decisiones actúa o no actúa. Nunca obra a medias. Actuar a medias equivale, siempre, a equivocarse y es la manera más segura de no satisfacer las especificaciones mínimas

Actually, IBM went through a severe identity crisis. It almost missed the computer opportunity. It became capable of growth only through a palace coup which overthrew Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the company's founder, its chief executive, and for long years the prophet of "data processing.

taking pride in such ignorance is self-defeating.

By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.

Setting a posteriority is also unpleasant. Every posteriority is somebody else's top priority. It is much easier to draw up a nice list of top priorities and then to hedge by trying to do "just a little bit" of everything else as well. This makes everybody happy. The only drawback is, of course, that nothing whatever gets done.