Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

American Business Consultant, Professor of Philosophy and Politics, Social Ecologist and Author

"Knowledge workers are neither farmers nor labor nor business; they are employees of organizations."

"Leaders shouldn't attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that and you can't compromise."

"Management is not being brilliant. Management is being conscientious."

"Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank."

"Mentor: Someone whose hindsight can become your foresight "

"No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary human beings perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each man's strength to help all the others perform. The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things."

"People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year."

"No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility."

"One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it."

"Promotion should not be more important than accomplishment, or avoiding instability more important than taking the right risk."

"Production is not the application of tools to materials, but logic to work."

"The better a man is the more mistakes he will make for the more things he will try."

"Teamwork is neither good nor desirable. It is a fact. Wherever people work together or play together they do so as a team. Which team to use for what purpose is a crucial, difficult and risky decision that is even harder to unmake. Managements have yet to learn how to make it."

"Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined."

"Successful leaders don't start out asking, What do I want to do? They ask, What needs to be done? Then they ask, ‘Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?’ They don't tackle things they aren't good at. They make sure other necessities get done, but not by them. Successful leaders make sure that they succeed! They are not afraid of strength in others. Andrew Carnegie wanted to put on his gravestone, ‘Here lies a man who knew how to put into his service more able men than he was himself.’"

"The critical factor of a problem is the element that has to be changed before anything else can be changed."

"The greatest challenge to organizations is the balance between continuity and change. You need both. At different times, the balance is slightly more over here, or slightly more over there, but you need both. And balance is basically the greatest task in leadership. Organizations have to have continuity, and yet if there is not enough new challenge, not enough change, they become empty bureaucracies, awfully fast."

"The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem."

"The key question for a leader is, ‘What can I do in this organization that nobody else can do?’ And several questions emerge from that: ‘What did the good Lord ordain me for? What are my strengths? Where have I seen results?’ Very few of us ask these questions because very few of us even know how we perform. What am I good at? We don't usually ask that question. We've been trained to notice our weaknesses, not our strengths. Schools, of necessity, are remedial institutions. When teachers meet with parents, rarely do they say, ‘Your Johnny should do more writing. He's so talented in writing.’ Now, more likely you'll hear, ‘Johnny needs more work on his math. He's a bit weak in that area.’ As a result, few of us really know our strengths. The great teachers, and great leaders, recognize strengths and focus on them. "

"The overseer of the unskilled peasants who dragged stone for the pyramids did not concern himself with morale or motivation."

"The most critical case in a corporation, especially a big one, is when everything goes well, when you have accomplished your objectives. When the temptation is to work twice as hard instead of saying, have we have accomplished our objectives, we have to think again."

"The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction, and mal-performance."

"The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things."

"The real development I've seen of people in organizations, especially in big ones, comes from their being volunteers in a nonprofit organization -- where you have responsibility, you see results, and you quickly learn what your values are. There is no better way to understand your strengths and discover where you belong than to volunteer in a nonprofit. That is probably the great opportunity for the social sector -- and especially in its relationship to business."

"There are no creeds in mathematics."

"To succeed in this new world, we will have to learn, first, who we are. Few people, even highly successful people, can answer the questions, ‘Do you know what you're good at? Do you know what you need to learn so that you get the full benefit of your strengths?’ Few have even asked themselves these questions."

"The success and ultimately the survival of every business, large or small, depends in the last analysis on its ability to develop people. This ability is not measured by any of our conventional yardsticks of economic success; yet, is the final measurement."

"Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else."

"Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window."

"What managers decide to stop doing is often more important than what they decide to do."

"And yet who else is there to take care of society, its problems and its ills? These organizations collectively are society…Power must always be balanced by responsibility; otherwise it becomes tyranny. And organizations do have power. "

"Even the small business today consists increasingly of people who apply knowledge rather than manual skill and muscle to work. "

"In all developed countries, knowledge workers have already become the center of gravity of the labor force, even in numbers. "

"In most discussions of the social responsibility of business it is assumed that making a profit is fundamentally incompatible with social responsibility or is at least irrelevant to it."

"Instead of capitalists and proletarians, the classes of the post-capitalist society are knowledge workers and service workers. "

"Every knowledge worker in modern organization is an executive if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results. "

"Finally, these new industries differ from the traditional 'modern' industry in that they will employ predominantly knowledge workers rather than manual workers. "

"Kierkegaard’s question, ‘How is human existence possible?’ has a simple answer: human existence is possible only in tension between man’s simultaneous life as an individual in the spirit and as a citizen in society. "

"It is the increasingly important responsibility (of management) to create the capital that alone can finance tomorrow’s jobs. In a modern economy the main source of capital formation is business profits. "

"Leaders in every single institution and in every single sector … have two responsibilities. They are responsible and accountable for the performance of their institutions, and that requires them and their institutions to be concentrated, focused, limited. They are responsible also, however, for the community as a whole."

"Only if business learns how to convert the major social challenges facing developed societies today into novel and profitable business opportunities can we hope to surmount these challenges in the future."

"Organizations can only do damage to themselves and to society if they tackle tasks that are beyond their specialized competence, their specialized values, their specialized functions. The American hospital did a good deal of harm to itself and little good to the community when it attempted to take on the inner city’s social ills by founding inner-city clinics. The American school has failed miserably to produce racial integration. In both cases, the causes are undoubtedly good; they cry out for action. But the action needed or at least the action chosen by these various organizations was beyond such organizations’ focus and function, and totally beyond their competence."

"Social responsibility objectives need to be built into the strategy of a business, rather than merely be statements of good intentions. "

"Primum non nocere – first, do no harm – is the first responsibility of a professional, as spelled out in the Hippocratic Oath. As the physicians found out long ago, this apparently modest requirement is far from easy. It requires a far-reaching understanding of the impact of our actions on another person or on a society, and a willingness to think through our effect on others. "

"Productive work in today's society and economy is work that applies vision, knowledge and concepts -- work that is based on the mind rather than the hand. "

"The more knowledge-based an institution becomes, the more it depends on the willingness of individuals to take responsibility for contribution to the whole, for understanding the objectives, the values, the performance of the whole, and for making themselves understood by the other professionals, the other knowledge people in the organization. "

"The center of gravity among 'employees' has sharply shifted to the educated, employed, middle class, that is, to people who see themselves as 'technical' and increasingly as 'professional'. "

"The center of gravity of the work force is shifting from the manual worker to the knowledge worker. "

"The first responsibility of business is to make enough profit to cover the costs for the future. If this social responsibility is not met, no other social responsibility can be met. "

"The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity. "