118 quotes
Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.
The Age of Discontinuity (1969)
A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant - and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates
Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992)
If "socialism" is defined as "ownership of the means of production"--and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition--then the United States is the first truly Socialist country.
The Pension Fund Revolution (1976)
We do not need more laws. No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model.
MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973)
Decisions exist only in the present.
MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973)
I always stress to my clients that they have to be ready to change. You have to be prepared to make your innovation obsolete. But many companies aren’t prepared to do that.
A tool is not necessarily better because it is bigger. A tool is best if it does the job required with a minimum of effort, with a minimum of complexity, and with a minimum of power.
MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973)
The major incentive to productivity and efficiency are social and moral rather than financial.
The New Society (1950)
Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will... be taken over by a Central government...
The Future of Industrial Man (1942)
Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.
To make the right decision the knowledge-worker must know what performance and results are needed... He cannot be supervised. He must direct, manage and motivate himself.
There can be no freedom if one man or one group of men... is assumed... inherently perfect or perfectible. Its claim to perfection or perfectibility is a claim to absolute rule.
The Future of Industrial Man (1942)
Keep the boss aware. Bosses, after all, are held responsible by their own bosses for the performance of their subordinates. They must be able to say: "I know what Anne [or John] is trying to do."
Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992)
This is a political book... It has a political purpose: to strengthen the will to maintain freedom against the threat of its abandonment in favor of totalitarianism.
The End of Economic Man (1939)
What we will need from now on are, increasingly, "effectiveness centers"', that is, organized efforts to make fully effective and productive the new workers, the knowledge worker, the employed middle-class professional.
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.
In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers, is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power.
The Future of Industrial Man (1942)
I have been saying for many years that we are using the word 'guru' only because 'charlatan' is too long to fit into a headline.
The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.
The Practice of Management (1954)
Engineers speak half–jokingly about Murphy's Law: " If anything can go wrong, it will." But complexity stands under a second law as well. Let me call it Drucker's law: "If one thing goes wrong, everything else will, and at the same time."
MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973)