Quotes
Culture
Peter Drucker said: “Culture—no matter how defined—is singularly persistent.” (Drucker on Culture in WSJ)
MIT professor Edgar Schein, father of the corporate culture “movement,” said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Measurement
Peter Drucker said: “Work implies not only that somebody is supposed to do the job, but also accountability, a deadline and, finally, the measurement of results —that is, feedback from results on the work and on the planning process itself.” (Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices)
He did not say: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
A Time of Turbulence
Peter Drucker said: “A time of turbulence is a dangerous time, but its greatest danger is a temptation to deny reality.” (Managing in Turbulent Times the 1993 Harper Business edition)
He did not say: “The greatest danger in times of turbulence, is not the turbulence, it’s acting with yesterday’s logic.”
The Future
Peter Drucker said: “…no human being can possibly predict the future, let alone control it.”
Peter Drucker said: “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. ”
Alan Kay, a computer scientist, most likely said: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
He did not say: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
The Bottleneck
“The ‘bottleneck’ is, after all, always ‘at the head of the bottle.’” (Drucker, Peter. Management. United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis, 2012. p. 522.)
Customers
Peter Drucker said: “Identifying the primary customer puts your priorities in order and gives you a reference point for critical decisions.”
Marketing Entrepreneurship & Innovation
Peter Drucker said: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”
Peter Drucker said: “Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society – and especially in the economy – as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. That is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur. It was intended as a manifesto and as a declaration of dissent: the entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes. As Joseph Schumpeter formulated it, his task is “creative destruction.”
Peter Drucker defines entrepreneurship, not just in terms of small or start-up businesses, but as “any business that engages in innovation. Innovation is defined as “the effort to create purposeful, focused change in an enterprise’s economic or social potential.” (Drucker 2013 p.143). In other words, innovation is change to create better results. One might say that Drucker thinks of innovation and entrepreneurship as synonymous.
Managing Oneself
Peter Drucker said: “You can’t lead without managing, and success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves—their strengths, their values, and how they best perform…and that you cannot manage other people unless you manage yourself first.”
Developing Employees & Human Talent
Peter Drucker said: “If you invest in the right people, with the right conditions, those people will create the right outcomes.”
Transition & Reinvention
Peter Drucker said: “Reinvention must happen when inevitably we reach a point in our lives or careers where we are no longer learning and growing.”
“The number of people who are really motivated by money is very small and most people need to feel that they are here for a purpose, and unless an organization can connect to this need to leave something behind that makes this a better world, or at least a different one, it won’t be successful over time.”
Contribution
Peter Drucker said: “To start with the question ‘What should I contribute?’ gives freedom because it gives responsibility.”
Strategy
Peter Drucker said: “Strategy is a commodity. Execution is an art.”