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
The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.
Men | Organization | Purpose | Purpose |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
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.
Better | Men | Organization | Purpose | Purpose | Strength |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer… Because it is its purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two — and only these two—basic functions: marketing and innovation… Marketing is so basic that it is not just enough to have a strong sales department and to entrust marketing to it. Marketing is not only much broader than selling; it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is from the customer’s point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must therefore permeate all areas of the enterprise.
Business | Enough | Purpose | Purpose | Responsibility | Business |
Government has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own. It is therefore just, only so far as it exists by their consent, useful only so far as it operates to their well-being.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
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.
Decision | Good | People | Play | Purpose | Purpose | Work | Learn |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation… The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
Becoming a force of nature doesn’t mean that all of our aspirations must be grand. First steps are often small, and initial visions that focus energy effectively often address immediate problems. What matters is engagement in the service of a larger purpose rather than lofty aspirations that paralyze action. Indeed, it’s a dangerous trap to believe that we can pursue only great visions. [Seeds Are Small.]
Energy | Focus | Force | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Service | Engagement |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
All that was an element of progress in the past or an instrument of moral and intellectual improvement of the human race is due to the practice of mutual aid, to the customs that recognized the equality of men and brought them to ally, to unite, to associate for the purpose of producing and consuming, to unite for purpose of defense to federate and to recognize no other judges in fighting out their differences than the arbitrators they took from their own midst.
Defense | Equality | Fighting | Human race | Improvement | Men | Past | Practice | Progress | Purpose | Purpose | Race |
Peter McWilliams, fully Peter Alexander McWilliams
The purpose of education is to make the choices clear to people, not to make the choices for people.
Peter Medawar, fully Sir Peter Brian Medawar
The scientific method is a potentiation of common sense, exercised with a specially firm determination not to persist in error if any exertion of hand or mind can deliver us from it. Like other exploratory processes, it can be resolved into a dialogue between fact and fancy, the actual and the possible; between what could be true and what is in fact the case. The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of Natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature. It begins as a story about a Possible World—a story which we invent and criticise and modify as we go along, so that it ends by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life.
Determination | Ends | Error | Method | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | Story | World | Think |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
The first constant in the job of management is to make human strength effective and human weaknesses irrelevant. That's the purpose of any organization, the one thing an organization does that individuals can't do better. The second constant is that managers are accountable for results, period. They are not being paid to be philosophers; they are not even being paid for their knowledge. They are paid for results. Management is not a branch of philosophy but a practice… and results are not quite as easy to define in an organization. The balance between short term and long term, for instance, will remain a constant challenge
Balance | Organization | Philosophy | Purpose | Purpose | Strength | Will |
Philip Wylie, fully Philip Gordon Wylie
The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose.
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
Wisdom can only be learned gradually, and every soul is not ready to receive or to understand the complexity of the purpose of life… Wisdom is attained in solitude… Wisdom is not in words, it is in understanding.
Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL
Rabbi Yochanan said: “Every assembly that is for a hallowed purpose shall in the end be established. But any assembly that is not for a hallowed purpose shall not ultimately be established.”