Management Quotes

“Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not "making friends and influencing people", that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“A man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths. The man who always knows exactly what people cannot do, but never sees anything they can do, will undermine the spirit of his organization.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“The one man to distrust, however, is the man who never makes a mistake, never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do. He is either a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Psychological despotism, whether enlightened or not, is gross misuse of psychology. The main purpose of psychology is to acquire insight into, and mastery of, oneself. Not for nothing were what we now call the behavioral sciences originally called the moral sciences and “Know thyself” their main precept. To use psychology to control, dominate, and manipulate others is self-destructive abuse of knowledge. It is also a particularly repugnant form of tyranny.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Managers are action-focused; they are not philosophers and should not be.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Measuring requires, first and foremost, analytical ability. But it also demands that measurement be used to make self-control possible, rather than abused to control people from the outside and above—that is, to dominate them.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management, Revised Edition

“When General Eisenhower was elected president, his predecessor, Harry Truman, said: “Poor Ike; when he was a general, he gave an order and it was carried out. Now he is going to sit in that big office and he’ll give an order and not a damn thing is going to happen.” The reason why “not a damn thing is going to happen” is, however, not that generals have more authority than presidents. It is that military organizations learned long ago that futility is the lot of most orders and organized the feedback to check on the execution of the order. They learned long ago that to go oneself and look is the only reliable feedback.5 Reports—all an American president is normally able to mobilize—are not much help. All military services have long ago learned that the officer who has given an order goes out and sees for himself whether it has been carried out. At the least he sends one of his own aides—he never relies on what he is told by the subordinate to whom the order was given. Not that he distrusts the subordinate; he has learned from experience to distrust communications.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Mutual understanding can never be attained by “communications down,” can never be created by talking. It can result only from “communications up.” It requires both the superior’s willingness to listen and a tool especially designed to make lower managers heard.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“An excess of meetings indicates that jobs have not been defined clearly, have not been structured big enough, have not been made truly responsible. Also the need for meetings indicates that the decisions and relations analyses either have not been made at all or have not been applied. The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“There is tremendous stress these days on liking people, helping people, getting along with people, as qualifications for a manager. These alone are never enough. In every successful organization there is one boss who does not like people, who does not help them, and who does not get along with them. Cold, unpleasant, demanding, he often teaches and develops more men than anyone else. He commands more respect than the most likable man ever could. He demands exacting workmanship of himself as well as of his men. He sets high standards and expects that they will be lived up to. He considers only what is right and never who is right. And though often himself a man of brilliance, he never rates intellectual brilliance above integrity in others. The manager who lacks these qualities of character—no matter how likable, helpful, or amiable, no matter even how competent or brilliant—is a menace and should be adjudged “unfit to be a manager and a gentleman.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“The work relationship has to be based on mutual respect. Psychological despotism is basically contemptuous—far more contemptuous than the traditional Theory X. It does not assume that people are lazy and resist work, but it assumes that the manager is healthy while everybody else is sick. It assumes that the manager is strong while everybody else is weak. It assumes that the manager knows while everybody else is ignorant. It assumes that the manager is right, whereas everybody else is stupid. These are the assumptions of foolish arrogance.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“At one point quantity turned into quality.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Different peoples have different cultures, beginning with their language. This is bound to become more of a problem as the world economy becomes more universal. The more homogeneous economically the world becomes—in its appetites, at least, if not in its actual economic conditions—the more will local and cultural roots be needed. People need a home—and even the most luxurious 2,000-room hotel is not a “home.” Managing the multinational corporation is therefore largely a problem of integrating political and cultural diversity into managerial unity.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“functional design, where it applies, makes the least psychological demands on the people. They are highly secure both in their work and in their relationships. When it, however, is being used beyond fairly narrow limits of size and complexity it creates emotional tensions, hostilities, and insecurities. People will then tend to see themselves and their functions belittled, besieged, attacked. They will come to see it as their first job to defend their function, to protect it against marauders in other functions, to make sure “it doesn’t get pushed around.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“But what stands out in Japanese history, as well as in today’s Japanese management behavior, is the capacity for making 180-degree turns—that is, for reaching radical and highly controversial decisions.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“It is, above all, fruitless and a waste of time to worry about what is acceptable and what one had better not say so as not to evoke resistance. The things one worries about never happen. And objections and difficulties no one thought about suddenly turn out to be almost insurmountable obstacles. One gains nothing, in other words, by starting out with the question “What is acceptable?” And in the process of answering it, one loses any chance to come up with an effective, let alone with the right, answer.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“De minimis non curat praetor (The magistrate does not consider trifles) said the Roman law almost two thousand years ago—but many decision-makers still need to learn it.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Above all, disagreement is needed to stimulate the imagination. One may not need imagination to find the one right solution to a problem. But then this is of value only in mathematics. In all matters of true uncertainty such as the executive deals with—whether his sphere be political, economic, social, or military—one needs creative solutions which create a new situation. And this means that one needs imagination—a new and different way of perceiving and understanding.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“in its people decisions, management must demonstrate that it realizes that integrity is one absolute requirement of a manager, the one quality that he has to bring with him and cannot be expected to acquire later on. And management must demonstrate that it requires the same integrity of itself.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“In an organization which manages by drives people either neglect their job to get on with the current drive, or silently organize for collective sabotage of the drive in order to get their work done. In either event they become deaf to the cry of “wolf.” And when the real crisis comes, when all hands should drop everything and pitch in, they treat it as just another case of management-created hysteria. Management by drive is a sure sign of confusion. It is an admission of incompetence. It is a sign that management does not think. But, above all, it is a sign that the company does not know what to expect of its managers and that, not knowing how to direct them, it misdirects them.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Measuring requires, first and foremost, analytical ability. But it also demands that measurement be used to make self-control possible rather than abused to control people from the outside and above—that is, to dominate them. It is the common violation of this principle that largely explains why measurement is the weakest area in the work of the manager today. As long as measurements are abused as a tool of control (for instance, as when measurements are used, as a weapon of an internal secret police that supplies audits and critical appraisals of a manager’s performance to the boss without even sending a carbon copy to the manager himself) measuring will remain the weakest area in the manager’s performance.2”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“…control has to be by feedback from the work done. The work itself has to provide the information. If it has to be checked all the time, there is no control”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“There is tremendous stress these days on liking people, helping people, getting along with people, as qualifications for a manager. These alone are never enough. In every successful organization there are bosses who do not like people, who do not help them, and who do not get along with them. Cold, unpleasant, demanding, they often teach and develop more people than anyone else. They command more respect than the most likable person ever could. They demand exacting workmanship of themselves and other people. They set high standards and expect that they will be lived up to. They consider only what is right and never who is right. And though often themselves persons of brilliance, they never rate intellectual brilliance above integrity in others. The manager who lacks these qualities of character—no matter how likable, helpful, or amiable, no matter, even, how competent or brilliant—is a menace who is unfit to be a manager.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management, Revised Edition

“Effective managers make effective decisions. There are six steps of effective decision making and five characteristics of effective decisions. First, and by far the most important step, effective decision makers define and classify the problem. It is much easier to fix a wrong solution to a problem if the problem has been defined correctly than it is to fix a “correct” solution to a problem that has been defined incorrectly. If a problem has been defined incorrectly, no solution to that problem can be found. Conversely, if a problem is defined correctly, then an incorrect solution will provide useful feedback information, leading the executive closer to the right solution. The remaining five steps of effective decision making are Ask, “Is this problem generic or unique?” Decisions that are generic ought to be solved by finding and applying a rule that someone else has used to solve the problem. For problems that are unique, the decision maker must next determine the boundary conditions that must be satisfied in order for the decision to be effective. Establishing boundary conditions requires an answer to the question, “What does the decision have to accomplish to be effective in solving the problem?” Next, the decision maker asks, “What is the right solution, given these conditions?” Then—and this is where a great many decisions fail—the decision maker must convert the decision into action by assigning to one or more persons the responsibility for carrying out the decision and by eliminating any barriers faced by those who must act. Finally, the effective decision maker follows up on the decision, obtains feedback on what actually happened as a result of the decision, and compares this with the intended or desired results.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management, Revised Edition

“Good intentions are no excuse for incompetence. And the manager who believes that social consciousness is a substitute for managing his business—or his hospital or his university—so that it produces the results for the sake of which it exists, is either a fool or a knave or both.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“It is as important to decide when to abandon an innovative effort as it is to know which one to start. In fact, it may be more important. Successful laboratory directors know when to abandon a line of research which does not yield the expected results. The less successful ones keep hoping against hope, are dazzled by the “scientific challenge” of a project, or are fooled by the scientists’ repeated promise of a “breakthrough next year.” And the unsuccessful ones cannot abandon a project and cannot admit that what seemed like a good idea has turned into a waste of men, time, and money.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Nothing is further from the truth than the hoary myth of the Populists that the small man is being squeezed out of the marketplace by the giants. The innovative growth companies of the last twenty-five years all started as small businesses. And by and large the small businesses have done far better than the giants.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“The top man who concludes that his company needs to grow but who also then realizes that he does not want to change himself and his behavior has, in conscience, only one line of action open to him. He has to step aside. Even if he legally owns the company, he does not own the lives of other people. A company is not a child—and even with a human child, the time comes when the parent has to accept that the child has grown up and needs to be independent and on his own.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“What is demanded of the top man is indeed a great deal. He has to accept that he no longer can be the virtuoso performer. Instead he has to become the “conductor.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices