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41 " The computer is a moron. "
― Peter F. Drucker
42 " When a change in perception takes place, the facts do not change. Their meaning does. "
― Peter F. Drucker , Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles
43 " We hear a great deal of talk about the midlife crisis of the executive. It is mostly boredom. At 45, most executives have reached the peak of their business careers, and they know it. After 20 years of doing very much the same kind of work, they are very good at their jobs. But they are not learning or contributing or deriving challenge and satisfaction from the job. And yet they are still likely to face another 20 if not 25 years of work. That is why managing oneself increasingly leads one to begin a second career.There are three ways to develop a second career. The first is actually to start one. [...] The second way to prepare for the second half of your life is to develop a parallel career. [...] Finally, there are the social entrepreneurs.[...]There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life: You must begin doing so long before you enter it. "
― Peter F. Drucker , Managing Oneself
44 " Working life has extended so much in the last fifty years that it exceeds life expectancy of even the most successful businesses. Very few businesses are successful for more than 25 or 30 years. And yet most educated people who go to work in their early twenties will keep working until they are 70. And so they had better be prepared for a second career whether it's in another organization where they are doing what they have been doing or in a new line of work. They must be prepared to learn again. They must be prepared to position themselves. They must be prepared to want to learn- to see it not as something they need to do, but as something they enjoy doing. They will have to learn how to learn. "
45 " Most people think they know what they’re good at. They are usually wrong. "
46 " The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance. "
47 " Alliances are difficult precisely because there is no 'boss' in them. They are partnership. And partners are equals, by definition. One cannot give orders to a partner. Hence the secret of a successful alliance is to manage it as a marketing relationship. In the traditional organization in which command and control are based on ownership, managers start out with the question "how do we get our people to accept what we think they should be doing?" In a partnership one considers the other partner as a customer. And the first question is not "what do we want to do," it is, "what are the partners' goals, the partners' objectives, what is value for the partner, how does the partner work and operate?" Once this is understood and accepted, the alliance will work. "
48 " Each [co-worker] works his or her way, not your way. And each is entitled to work in his or her way. What matters is whether they perform and what their values are. As far as how they perform--each is likely to do it differently. The first secret to effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values. Working relationships are as much based on the people as they are on the work. "
49 " Successful innovators are..not risk-focused; they are opportunity focused. "
50 " We need to encourage habits of flexibility, of continuous learning, and of acceptance of change as normal and as opportunity - for institutions as well as for individuals. "
51 " Management is about doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. "
52 " Many brilliant people believe that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work. "
53 " The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said. "
54 " There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all. "
55 " 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. "
56 " Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation. "
57 " 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. "
― Peter F. Drucker , Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
58 " Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. "
59 " The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers.The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question. "
60 " 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. "
― Peter F. Drucker , Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices