Culture
“Culture, no matter how defined, is singularly persistent.”
— Drucker on Culture, The Wall Street Journal
Commonly misattributed to Drucker:
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
— This line is attributed to MIT professor Edgar Schein, considered the father of the corporate culture movement, not to Peter Drucker.
Measurement
“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
Not a Drucker quote:
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
A Time of Turbulence
“A time of turbulence is a dangerous time, but its greatest danger is a temptation to deny reality.”
— Managing in Turbulent Times, 1993 Harper Business edition
Not a Drucker quote:
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it’s acting with yesterday’s logic.”
The Future
“No human being can possibly predict the future, let alone control it.”
“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.”
Likely a different author:
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
— Most often attributed to computer scientist Alan Kay, not Drucker. Drucker did not say the frequently circulated variant, “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.”
— Management (Taylor & Francis, 2012), p. 522
Customers
“Identifying the primary customer puts your priorities in order and gives you a reference point for critical decisions.”
Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation
“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.”
“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.”
Drucker defines entrepreneurship not merely as small or start-up businesses, but as any business that engages in innovation. He defines innovation as “the effort to create purposeful, focused change in an enterprise’s economic or social potential” (Drucker, 2013, p. 143). Drucker treats innovation and entrepreneurship as closely synonymous.
Managing Oneself
“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 and Human Talent
“If you invest in the right people, with the right conditions, those people will create the right
outcomes.”
Transition and Reinvention
“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.”
Developing Employees and Human Talent
“To start with the question, ‘What should I contribute?’ gives freedom because it gives responsibility.”
Strategy and Other Frequently Cited Lines
“Strategy is a commodity. Execution is an art.”
“So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.”
“Leadership is not magnetic personality; that can just as well be a glib tongue. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights.”
“Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organisation. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both.”
“Long-range planning does not deal with the future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.”
“There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”
“Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, they are not gained by solving problems.”
“People who don’t take risks make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks make about two big mistakes a year.”
“An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and focused. It should do only one thing, otherwise it confuses.”
“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”
“Time is the scarcest resource. Unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.”
Frequently garbled version:
“Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.”
The precise formulation is:
“Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.”
Compiled and maintained by the Drucker Institute to help ensure Peter Drucker’s ideas are represented accurately in
public discourse.