Peter Drucker

The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.

There's an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.

The paradox of the prophet: his very success is his failure. The prophet whose time has come no longer shocks; he entertains.

Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.

The true business of every company is to make and keep customers.

The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society.

What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady and continuous.

No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.

If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.

Business has only two basic functions - marketing and innovation.

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

The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission.

No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.

People in any organization, including bureaucrats and politicians, are always attached to the obsolete; the obsolescent; the things that should have worked but didn't; the things that once were productive and no longer are.

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.