Peter F. Drucker (1909 – 2005)
Austrian-born American writer, management consultant and university professor.
Knowing Yourself ...We also seldom know what gifts we are not endowed with. We will have to learn where we belong, what we have to learn to get the full benefit from our strengths, where our weaknesses lie, what our values are. We also have to know ourselves temperamentally: "Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? What am I committed to? And what is my contribution?"
We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad, ...We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order... We see change as being order itself--indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one.
Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will... be taken over by a Central government...
Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.
Although he reputedly hated the label of ‘guru’, Peter Drucker was, by any standards, the greatest management guru the world has yet seen. In 1996, the McKinsey Quarterly journal described him as the ‘the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow’ and Robert Heller described him as ‘the greatest man in the history of management’, praise indeed for a man who described himself as ‘just an old journalist’.
We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.
The major incentive to productivity and efficiency are social and moral rather than financial.
Financial "synergy" is a will-o'-the-wisp.It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice.
The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.
There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology, society, economy, and institutions.
There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.
Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.
Through systematic terror, through indoctrination, through systematic manipulation of stimulus, reward, and punishment, we can today break man and convert him into brute animal... The first step toward survival is therefore to make government legitimate again by attempting to deprive it of these powers... by international action to ban such powers.
The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives.
To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.
The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.
The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.
Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.
The fundamental reality for every worker, from sweeper to executive vice-president, is the eight hours or so that he spends on the job. In our society of organizations, it is the job through which the great majority has access to achievement, to fulfillment, and to community.
Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.