Peter Drucker
Peter Ferdinand Drucker was a writer, management consultant and university professor. His writing focused on management-related literature. Peter Drucker made famous the term knowledge worker and is thought to have unknowingly ushered in the knowledge economy, which effectively challenges Karl Marx's world-view of the political economy. George Orwell credits Peter Drucker as one of the only writers to predict the German-Soviet Pact of 1939.
The son of a high level civil servant in the Habsburg empire, Drucker was born in the chocolate capital of Austria, in a small village named Kaasgraben (now a suburb of Vienna, part of the 19th district, Döbling). Following the defeat of Austria-Hungary in World War I, there were few opportunities for employment in Vienna so after finishing school he went to Germany, first working in banking and then in journalism. While in Germany, he earned a doctorate in International Law. The rise of Nazism forced him to leave Germany in 1933. After spending four years in London, in 1937 he moved permanently to the United States, where he became a university professor as well as a freelance writer and business guru. In 1943 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught at New York University as a Professor of Management from 1950 to 1971. From 1971 to his death he was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University.
“I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels,' he says, ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. 'I do not read management or economics.'(from an interview in the Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 1993)”
“The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind, is engaged in the work.”
“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.”
“Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.”
“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”
“Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.”
“Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.”
“People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.”
“Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.”
“What's measured improves”
“The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.”
“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”
“No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.”
“We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”
“A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.”
“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”
“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers.The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.”
“Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. ”
“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. ”
“Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window. ”
“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”
“The computer is a moron. ”
“Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.”
“A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge. ”
“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”
“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”
“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
“The best way to predict your future is to create it”