Peter Drucker

Austria
19 Nov 1909 // 11 Nov 2005
Management Consultant / Educator / Author

Quotes

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A young person entering the work force in 2000...has almost no chance of working for the same company even a decade hence. In this world people must take responsibility for their own futures. They cannot simply count on ascending a career ladder.

Forbes.com, 2000
The only profit center is the customer.

Harvard Business Review (1995)
There is only one valid definition of business: to create a customer.

The Practice of Management (1954)
Again and again in business history, an unknown competitor comes from nowhere and in a few short years overtakes the established leaders without apparently even breathing hard.

Harvard Business Review (January/February 1995)
You must accept that if the computer is a tool, it is the job of the tool user to know what to use it for.

Quoted in Techno Vision (C. B. Wang; 1994)
Knowledge is the only meaningful resource today.

Post-capitalist Society (1993)
We live in an economy where knowledge, not buildings and machinery, is the chief resource and where knowledge-workers make up the biggest part of the work force. Until well into the 20th century, most workers were manual workers. Today...40% of our total work force, are knowledge-workers.

Forbes.com, 2000
I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information.

Forbes, 1987
The single greatest challenge facing managers in the developed countries of the world is to raise the productivity of knowledge and service works.

Harvard Business Review (November/December 1991)
The task of the conscience activities is not to help the organization improve on its present activities. Its task is to hold the organization to its own standards, to remind the organization what it should be, but isn't, doing.

Management (1974)
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays