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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
Would
Successful
Asks
Start
Done
Leaders
Right
Asking
Needs
Difference
Make
Leader
Things
Differences

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One does not manage people. The task is to lead people.
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An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.
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Leaders shouldn?t attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can?t compromise.
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Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.
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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.
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Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.
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Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.
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The strength of the computer lies in its being a logic machine. It does precisely what it is programed to do. This makes it fast and precise. It also makes it a total moron for logic is essentially stupid.
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Tomorrow always arrives. It is always different. And even the mightiest company is in trouble if it has not worked on the future. Being surprised by what happens is a risk that even the largest and richest company cannot afford, and even the smallest business need not run.
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A fundamental responsibility of leadership is make sure that everybody knows the mission, understands it, lives it.
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When it rains manna from heaven, some people put up an umbrella. Others reach for a big spoon.
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During periods of discontinuous, abrupt change, the essence of adaptation involves a keen sensitivity to what should be abandoned - not what should be changed or introduced. A willingness to depart from the familiar has distinct survival value.
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Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.
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The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.
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Any time I have seen someone accomplishing something magnificent, they have been a monomaniac with a mission. A single-minded individual with a passion.
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Any organisation develops people it either forms them or deforms them.
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Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people -- and allow people to place themselves -- according to their strengths.
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What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.
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To make a living is no longer enough. Work also has to make a life.
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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.
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