Peter F. Drucker (1909 – 2005)
Austrian-born American writer, management consultant and university professor.
Decisions exist only in the present.
...all earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.
Sören Kierkegaard has another answer: human existence is possible as existence not in despair, as existence not in tragedy; it is possible as existence in faith... Faith is the belief that in God the impossible is possible, that in Him time and eternity are one, that both life and death are meaningful.
A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.
Tomorrow everybody - or practically everybody - will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.
Communication is always "propaganda." The emitter always wants "to get something across."
The moment people talk of "implementing" instead of "doing," and of "finalizing" instead of "finishing," the organization is already running a fever.
"Loafing" is easy, but "leisure" is difficult.
A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.
The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.
When Henry Ford said, "The customer can have a car in any color as long as it's black," he was not joking.
Keep the boss aware. Bosses, after all, are held responsible by their own bosses for the performance of their subordinates. They must be able to say: "I know what Anne [or John] is trying to do."
The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.
Morale in an organization does not mean that "people get along together"; the test is performance not conformance.
The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago.
Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management.
"Value added" is a meaningless concept for a retail business , for a bank, for a life insurance company, and for any other business which is not primarily engaged in manufacturing.
A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.
Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won't survive. It's as large a change as when we first got the printed book. Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? And for the middle-class family, college education for their children is as much of a necessity as is medical care—without it the kids have no future. Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis.
No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.