In the words of Peter Drucker:
Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works.
The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic.
To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.
Any organisation develops people; it either forms them or deforms them.
Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.
The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.
The relevant question is not simply what shall we do tomorrow, but rather what shall we do today in order to get ready for tomorrow.
The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.
Knowledge is the source of Wealth. Applied to tasks we already know, it becomes Productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes Innovation.
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
The basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge.
The leader sees leadership as responsibility rather than as rank and privilege.
Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive.
The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.
Look at government programs for the past fifty years. Every single one - except warfare - achieved the exact opposite of its announced goal.
There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.
We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.
If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.
Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up.
It's amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed.
Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.
History has been written not by the most talented but by the most motivated.
The only real difference between one organization and another is the performance of its people.
We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.
Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen.
The only skill that will be important in the 21st century is the skill of learning new skills.Everythi ng else will become obsolete over time.
The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it.
Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.
Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.
The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system's weaknesses irrelevant.
More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.
To make the future demands courage. It demands work. But it also demands faith.
Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.
The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it's dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it.
It is willingness of people to give of themselves over and above the demands of the job that distinguishes the great from the merely adequate.
Effective people are not problem minded; they're opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively.
The purpose of information is not knowledge. It is being able to take the right action.
The better a man is the more mistakes will he make – for the more new things he will try.
Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.
Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.
Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.
No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.
The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.
As a manager you're paid to be uncomfortable. If you're comfortable, it's a sure sign you're doing things wrong.
A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.
The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.
The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.
You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths.
The key to greatness is to look for people's potential and spend time developing it.
No other area offers richer opportunities for successful innovation than the unexpected success.
What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady and continuous.
No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.
Most leaders don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.
No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility.
There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.
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