Peter Drucker

It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.

Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.

The one to distrust is the person who never makes a mistake, never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried and the trivial.

The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

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?'

Trees die from the top”. No one should ever become a strategist unless he or she is willing to have his or her character serve as a model for subordinates

The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.

Use feedback analysis to identify your strengths. Then go to work on improving your strengths. Identify and eliminate bad habits that hinder the full development of your strengths. Figure out what you should do and do it. Finally, decide what you should not do.

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.

Thus, for those who are willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovation opportunity.

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

Knowledge people and service people learn the most when they teach .

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.

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two - and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are 'costs'.

The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.

It's more important to do the right thing than to do things right.

Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are a means to mobilize resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.

To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.

The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.