Peter Drucker Quotes

"The individual needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of his Creator and subject to Him. p. 126"

"We will have to learn to lead people rather then to contain them. p. 30"

"We still think and talk of the basic problems of an industrial society as problems that can be solved by changing the "system," that is the superstructure of political organization. Yet the real problems lie within the [industrial] enterprise. On the contrary, it is the solution of the problems of the enterprise that will shape the system under which we live."

"[T]hroughout the ages to be educated meant to be unproductive.... our word "school" - and its equivalent in all European languages - derives from a Greek word meaning "leisure." p. 115"

"Southwestern Bulletin, New Series, Vol. 32, No. 3."

"[C]ollaboration between... divergent systems is possible... only as long as both are stable. ...International security is ...based upon the internal political and social security of each of the Great Powers."

"The company is not and must never claim to be home, family, religion, life or fate for the individual. It must never interfere in his private life or his citizenship. He is tied to the company through a voluntary and cancellable employment contract, not through some mystical or indissoluble bond. p. 387"

"[I]n a free society each individual has a responsibility towards the beliefs of his society—a responsibility on which all the rights and duties of citizenship are founded."

"Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission. Adventures of a Bystander (1979) (Autobiography)"

"No matter how deeply wedded one may be to the free enterprise system (and I, for one, am wedded for life), one has to accept the need for positive government; one has to consider government action on a sizable scale as desirable rather than as a necessary evil. p. 178"

"Never underrate the boss! The boss may look illiterate. He may look stupid. But there is no risk at all in overrating a boss. If you underrate him he will bitterly resent it or impute to you the deficiency in brains and knowledge you imputed to him. p. 140"

"Profit is not a cause but a result- p. 71"

"...what's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There is no excuse for it. No justification. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we will pay a heavy price for it. A cantankerous interview with Peter Drucker, Wired (August 1996)"

"Communication is always "propaganda." The emitter always wants "to get something across." p. 487"

"Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity that causes it, this is therefore the best-indeed the only truly good-solution. p. 333"

"There is an unbroken chain of opposition to the introduction of economic freedom and to the capitalist autonomy of the economic sphere... In every case the opposition could only be overcome - peacefully or by force - because of the promise of capitalism to establish equality... That this promise was an illusion we all know. p. 39"

"[W]e have been forced to put a major emphasis on the acquisition of technical knowledge."

"The subordinate's job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual. p. 138"

"One reason for the tremendous increase in health-care costs in the U.S. is managerial neglect of the "hotel services" by the people who dominate the hospital, such as doctors and nurses. p. 539"

"Note: see W Edwards Deming "Blame the process, not the people."

"Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it. p. 88"

"There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable. p. 681"

"Today we know that a free society is not the product of nature, but of man; that it is not self-maintaining and self-winding, but demands the vigilant and constant support of responsible citizens... freedom is not inevitable and easy... but the product of a long, hard struggle of man's reason and man's faith that has to be fought over and won again by every generation."

"Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will... be taken over by a Central government... p. 96"

"Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations; most computer users have found that they now need more, and more expensive clerks, even though they call them "operators" or "programmers. Drucker cited in: William White (1981) Library journal. Volume 106, Nr 1-12. p. 1048"

"Our society has become an employee society. In the early 1900s people asked, “What do you do?” Today they tend to ask, “Whom do you work for?” p. 4"

"[T]he Western European democracies... will be forced into totalitarianism unless they produce a noneconomic society striving for the freedom and equality of the individual. p. 242"

"Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society. p. 41"

"There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer. p. 37"

"The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago. p. 525"

"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. The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition (1993)"

"The citizen of today in every developed country is typically an employee. He works for one of the institutions. He looks to them for his livelihood. He looks to them for his opportunities. He looks to them for access to status and function in society, as well as for personal fulfillment and achievement."

"Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management. p. 761"