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Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker Quotes

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Famous Peter Drucker Quotes

“Manners are the lubricating oil of an organization. It is a law of nature that two moving bodies in contact with each other create friction. This is as true for human beings as it is for inanimate objects. Manners- simple things like saying 'please' and 'thank you' and knowing a person’s name or asking after her family enable two people to work together whether they like each other or not. Bright people, especially bright young people, often do not understand this. If analysis shows that someone’s brilliant work fails again and again as soon as cooperation from others is required, it probably indicates a lack of courtesy – that is, a lack of manners.”

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Author:Peter Drucker
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“Each [co-worker] works his or her way, not your way. And each is entitled to work in his or her way. What matters is whether they perform and what their values are. As far as how they perform--each is likely to do it differently. The first secret to effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values. Working relationships are as much based on the people as they are on the work.”

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Author:Peter Drucker
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“Strategic planning is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial (risk-taking) decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity; organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions; and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback.”

ProcessDecisionResultsEffortRiskNeededExpectationsPlanningOrganizedFeedbackStrategicEntrepreneurialSystematicMeasuringRisk-takingStrategic Planning
Book:Management
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“It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people: a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are told.”

PeopleWorldShouldDoeTwoDifferentDoneJobsOrderClassDesignSeparationPlanningRhythmAnalysisDividedPaceDifferent PeoplesDoersPlanners
Book:People and Performance
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“The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves.”

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Book:Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New
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“Human beings need community. If there are no communities available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities... Only the social sector, that is, the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, can create what we now need, communities for citizens... What the dawning 21st century needs above all is equally explosive growth of the nonprofit social sector in building communities in the newly dominant social environment, the city.”

IfsNeedsHumansEndsSocialGrowthCommunityHuman BeingsCitiesEnvironmentCenturyBuildingCitizensOrganizationAvailableDestructiveDominant21st CenturyConstructiveExplosivesNonprofitsSocial EnvironmentBuilding Community
Author:Peter Drucker
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“Although he reputedly hated the label of 'guru', Peter Drucker was, by any standards, the greatest management guru the world has yet seen. In 1996, the McKinsey Quarterly journal described him as the 'the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow' and Robert Heller described him as 'the greatest man in the history of management', praise indeed for a man who described himself as 'just an old journalist'.”

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Author:Peter Drucker
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“Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior.”

OrderIndividualBeliefSocialResultsProgressEconomicExpressionEqualBehaviorCapitalismProfitSupremeRulersCreedsMarxismAbolitionThis SocietySocial OrderSocial BehaviorEconomic ProgressFreedom And Equality
Author:Peter Drucker
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“There is an unbroken chain of opposition to the introduction of economic freedom and to the capitalist autonomy of the economic sphere... In every case the opposition could only be overcome - peacefully or by force - because of the promise of capitalism to establish equality... That this promise was an illusion we all know.”

KnowsForceCasesEconomicPromiseIllusionCapitalismOvercomingChainsOppositionSpheresCapitalistAutonomyIntroductionUnbrokenEconomic Freedom
Book:The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“Unless we realize that the essence of Nazism is also an attempt to solve a universal problem of Western civilization - that of the industrial society - and that the basic principles on which the Nazis base this attempt are also in no way confined to Germany, we do not know what we fight for or what we fight against... The war is being fought for the structure of industrial society - its basic principles, its purposes, and its institutions.”

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Author:Peter Drucker
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“The company is not and must never claim to be home, family, religion, life or fate for the individual. It must never interfere in his private life or his citizenship. He is tied to the company through a voluntary and cancellable employment contract, not through some mystical or indissoluble bond.”

HomeIndividualCompanyFateClaimsEmploymentContractsTiedInterfereCitizenshipMysticalPrivate Life
Book:The Practice of Management
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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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Author:Peter Drucker
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