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Successful leaders don't start out asking, 'What do I want to do?' They ask, 'What needs to be done?' Then they ask, 'Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?'

Peter Drucker

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Peter Drucker
Age: 95 †
Born: 1909
Born: November 19
Died: 2005
Died: November 11
Author
Businessperson
Columnist
Economist
Journalist
Lawyer
Philosopher
Sculptor
University Teacher
Writer
Vienna
Austria
Peter F. Drucker
Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Make
Leader
Things
Differences
Would
Successful
Asks
Start
Done
Leaders
Right
Asking
Needs
Difference

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If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.
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There's no such thing as knowledge management there are only knowledgeable people. Information only becomes knowledge in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it.
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The worker's effectiveness is determined largely by the way he is being managed.
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What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can't be very good.
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Important decisions are risky. They should be controversial. Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework.
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What's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There's no excuse for it. No justification. No explanation. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we'll pay a very nasty price.
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To make the future demands courage. It demands work. But it also demands faith.
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Systematic change requires a willingness to look on change as an opportunity.
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There are usually half a dozen right answers to what needs to be done. Yet, unless a person makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing.
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The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.
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Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
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Thus, for those who are willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovation opportunity.
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Business exists to supply goods and services to customers and economic surplus to society, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers or even dividends to shareholders.
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Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable.
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What gets measured gets managed.
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Salvation by society failed the most where it promised the most, in the communist countries. But it also failed in the West. Practically no government program enacted since the 1950s in the Western world - or in the communist countries - has been successful.
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An effective executive builds on strengths - their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates, and on the strength of the situation.
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Leadership is lifting a person's vision to high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
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Knowledge is power, which is why people who had it in the past often tried to make a secret of it. In post-capitalism, power comes from transmitting information to make it productive, not from hiding it.
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We always remember best the irrelevant.
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