Peter Ferdinand Drucker is known as the father of modern management. He introduced many concepts that have been embraced by modern business corporations around the world. Greatest Peter Drucker quotes will give you timeless wisdom on business management, leadership, team work, innovation, and competition.
If you’re searching for most inspirational business quotes that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of entrepreneur mindset quotes, wise quotes for CEOs, and proactive customer service quotes.
Most Famous Peter Drucker Quotes
One cannot buy, rent or hire more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it. Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday’s time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time. All work takes place in, and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource.
Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.
If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.
A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.
Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes… but no plans.
Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.
Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.
Leadership is not magnetic personality–that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not making friends and influencing people –that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.
The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.
No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that’s another matter.
Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.
We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.
The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.
Time is the scarcest resource of the manager; If it is not managed, nothing else can be managed.
Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.
Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
Inspirational Peter Drucker Quotes
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
Long-range planning does not deal with the future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.
The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do, but the absence of doing it.
The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.
No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.
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.
People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.
What gets measured gets improved.
The better a man is the more mistakes he will make for the more things he will try.
History has been written not by the most talented but by the most motivated.
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.
Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.
The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
Successful leaders don’t start out asking, What do I want to do? They ask, What needs to be done? Then they ask, Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.
Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.
Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.
Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.
Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic.
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader’s charisma. What matters is the leader’s mission.
The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say I. And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say I. They don’t think I. They think we; they think team. They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but we gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.
