Peter Drucker

The only skill that will be important in the 21st century is the skill of learning new skills.Everythi ng else will become obsolete over time.

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

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.

An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.

Institutions mistake good intentions for objectives. They say "health care"; that's an intention, not an objective.

Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up.

In todays economy, the most important resource is no longer labor, capital or land; it is knowledge

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.

One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work.

You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.

Great wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.

Strategic management is not a box of tricks or a bundle of techniques. It is analytical thinking and commitment of resources to action. But quantification alone is not planning. Some of the most important issues in strategic management cannot be quantified at all.

Systematic decision review also shows executives their own weaknesses, particularly the areas in which they are simply incompetent. In these areas, smart executives don't make decisions or take actions. They delegate.

To make the future demands courage. It demands work. But it also demands faith.

A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it.