657 Quotes by Peter Drucker

How can we overcome the resistance to innovation that plagues most organizations?

That people even in well paid jobs choose ever earlier retirement is a severe indictment of our organizations -- not just business , but government service, the universities. These people don't find their jobs interesting.

What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can't be very good.

Entrepreneurs believe that profit is what matters most in a new enterprise. But profit is secondary. Cash flow matters most.

Every first-rate editor I have ever heard of reads, edits and rewrites every word that goes into his publication.... Good editors are not 'permissive'; they do not let their colleagues do 'their thing'; they make sure that everybody does the 'paper's thing.' A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done.

When Henry Ford said, "The customer can have a car in any color as long as it's black," he was not joking.

All companies are service companies; some also manufacture products.

There are companies that are good at improving what they're already doing. There are companies that are good at extending what they're doing. And finally there are companies that are good at innovation. Every large company has to be able to do all three - improve, extend, and innovate - simultaneously.

More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.