Management Quotes

“The top man in a company—especially in a small or fair-sized company that has been growing fast—is typically exceedingly proud of the men who work with him. And yet—and this is the infallible symptom of the need for change—not one of the “boys” is “quite ready yet.” When the time for change comes, he always finds good reasons for not moving this man to that bigger responsibility, for not turning over a key area to another man, and so on. He always says “so and so is the best man—but he is not quite ready.” This is a clear indication that the top man himself is not ready.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“A company that is not able to attract, motivate, and hold men of talent and competence will not survive. Increasingly, this will mean attracting, motivating, and holding the knowledge worker. Unlike the manual worker of yesterday, the knowledge worker does not, however, look just for a job. He looks for a career. He looks for an opportunity.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“The idea that growth is by itself a goal is altogether a delusion. There is no virtue in a company’s getting bigger. The right goal is to become better. Growth, to be sound, should be the result of doing the right things. By itself, growth is vanity and little else.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Actually, IBM went through a severe identity crisis. It almost missed the computer opportunity. It became capable of growth only through a palace coup which overthrew Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the company’s founder, its chief executive, and for long years the prophet of “data processing.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Resolving these problems by a common code of behavior is the only way to make the multinational what it should and could be: a powerful instrument for economic strength and political harmony. The problems are largely political and legal. But they are problems which it is the duty—and the opportunity—of top management in the multinationals to think through. Otherwise, it is safe to predict, political solutions will be imposed on the multinationals which can only damage them and the world economy.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“The multinational is a problem precisely because its decisions are based on economic rationality and divorced from political sovereignty. There is no solution. The multinational is a political problem not because of anything it does or does not do. It is a problem because political sovereignty and economic reality no longer coincide. It does the multinational no good to protest that it and each of its subsidiaries are “good corporate citizens” of the country in which each operates. Of course, it and each of its subsidiaries observe the laws—at least to the same extent to which the country’s nationals observe it. But if the phrase is meant to imply—as it usually does—that the multinational in every country in which it operates thinks and acts in terms of that country’s national economy and market, it is nonsense. To do so would deny the whole logic of the multinational corporation, which is to optimize resources within the world market reality.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“People need roots. They need a home. They have a right to be concerned with the education of their children. They have a duty to aging parents. And they are probably more realistic than the company’s personnel vice-president when they argue that they are unlikely to “transplant” well. Yet the company better find a way to put to work the talents of a Manzoni. If (as this company did, by the way) it concludes that the man is no longer “promotable” and relegates him to second-class citizenship, it cuts off its nose to spite its face. Such a man will leave—as Manzoni did within a year or two.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Protectionism could indeed make the world economy poor and impede its functioning to the point of near-collapse. But it cannot destroy the common demands. It cannot undo the worldwide horizon and vision. The fundamental change has happened irrevocably. The question is not whether it will remain. The question is whether it can be turned to advantage—for society, for the individual, and for the business enterprise.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“A family member in a family business has a position of authority and power, regardless of his title and rank, even regardless of his job. He has the inside track to the top—as a son, a brother, a brother-in-law. No matter what his rank, he is top management. If he cannot command the respect due a member of top management on his own merit and on the basis of his performance, he should not be allowed to stay on the payroll.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Technology” does not necessarily mean “science and engineering.” Techne, the Greek word from which “technology” derives, means, after all, “useful knowledge,” or “organized skill,” rather than “engineering.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Nothing succeeds like concentration on the right business. And if the company is not in the right business, diversification will no more make it a “growth company,” than a man with a broken hip will be restored to health, by being taken on a twenty-mile forced march with an eighty-pound pack on his shoulders.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Engineers speak half-jokingly of Murphy’s Law: “If anything can go wrong, it will.” But complexity stands under a second law as well. Let me call it Drucker’s Law: “If one thing goes wrong, everything else will, and at the same time.” And if anything goes wrong, then there is a premium on knowing one’s business, on understanding it, on being close to it. Diversity and complexity, however, mean that one cannot know one’s businesses, cannot understand them, cannot be close to them.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Most top men in small businesses will protest that they already spend too much time outside the office. They are forever on the road. They themselves often handle the big accounts, for instance. They usually have to negotiate whatever loans they need from the bank. But they need outside time of a different kind. They need time to keep themselves informed on their market, on new opportunities, on changes that affect the business. They need time to be able to answer the question “And what should our business be?” Again, this does not require many hours. But it does require systematic, purposeful work that is different in character from the daily operating routine.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“No member will make a decision with regard to a matter for which he does not have primary responsibility. Should such a matter be brought to him, he will refer it to the colleague whose primary responsibility it is. Indeed it is a wise precaution for members of the top-management team not even to have an opinion on matters that are not within their own areas of primary responsibility.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“The question to ask is not “What is top management?” The question is “What are the specific things to be done in this business which are of crucial importance to the success and survival of the business and which can be done only by top management?”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“There are a number of tasks which are top-management tasks, not because top management is the “top”—that is, because it has the legal authority or the power—but because they are tasks that can be discharged only by people who are capable of seeing the whole business and of making decisions with respect to the whole business.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Personal relationships are the only thing that prevents breakdown in the systems structure. There is constant need for arbitration of conflicts between various members of the system, for adjudication of disputes or jurisdiction, on direction, on budgets, on people, on priorities, and so on. The most important people, regardless of their job descriptions or assigned tasks, spend most of their time keeping the machinery running. In no other organizational structure is the ratio between output and effort needed for internal cohesion as unfavorable as in the systems structure.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Autonomous managers in a federal structure cannot be content with “reports.” They must think through what top management needs to understand. And they must accept the responsibility for educating their top management.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Teams fail—and the failure rate has been high—primarily because they do not impose on themselves the self-discipline and responsibility that are required precisely because of the high degree of freedom team organization gives. No task force can be “permissive” and function. This is the reason why the same young educated people who clamor for team work tend so often in reality to resist it. It makes tremendous demands on self-discipline.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“The aim of strategic planning is action now.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management, Revised Edition

“But it is meaningless to speak of short-range and long-range plans. There are plans that lead to action today—and they are true plans, true strategic decisions. And there are plans that talk about action tomorrow—they are dreams, if not pretexts for nonthinking, nonplanning, nondoing. The”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management, Revised Edition

“During the process that precedes the decision, no mention is made of what the answer might be. This is done so that people will not be forced to take sides; once they have taken sides, a decision would be a victory for one side and a defeat for the other. Thus the whole process is focused on finding out what the decision is really about, not what the decision should be. Its result is a meeting of the minds that there is (or is not) a need for a change in behavior.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“If there is one point on which all authorities on Japan are in agreement, it is that Japanese institutions, whether business or government agencies, make decisions by consensus. The Japanese, we are told, debate a proposed decision throughout the organization until there is agreement on it. And only then do they make the decision.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Anyone who knows Western businesses, government agencies, or educational institutions knows that their managers make far too many small decisions as a rule. And nothing causes as much trouble in an organization as a lot of small decisions.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Indeed, everyone familiar with business today has seen situations in which a manager’s attempt to avoid misdirection through changing his manners has converted a fairly satisfactory relationship into a nightmare of embarrassment and misunderstanding. The manager himself becomes so self-conscious as to lose all easy relationship with his men. And the men in turn react with: “So help us, the old man has read a book; we used to know what he wanted of us, now ,we have to guess.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“The worst kind of replacement planning is the search for a “crown prince.” A crown prince either has a legal right to succeed; or else nomination is likely to destroy him. No matter how carefully concealed, picking a crown prince is an overt act which the whole organization very rapidly perceives. And then all the other possible contenders unite against the crown prince and work to bring him down—and they usually succeed.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers’ needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager’s business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“Restructuring a job usually means restructuring a score of jobs, moving people around, and upsetting everybody. There is one exception: the exceedingly rare, truly exceptional man for whose sake the rule should be broken.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner’s job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one’s own property.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices