Peter Drucker

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.

The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society.

Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.

Management" means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folklore and superstition, and of cooperation for force. . . Peter F.

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.

The computer is a moron.

In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.

The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

If a government commission had worked on the horse, you would have had the first horse that could operate its knee joint in both directions. The only trouble is it couldn’t have stood up.

Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.

A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.

There is only one valid definition of business: to create a customer.

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

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.

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.

No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Long-range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.