Peter F. Drucker

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.

A man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths. The man who always knows exactly what people cannot do, but never sees anything they can do, will undermine the spirit of his organization.

It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

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.

If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.

Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform and not to please their superiors.

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem – which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.

Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant.

There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

A decision without an alternative is a desperate gambler’s throw.

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.

1. What is our mission? 2. Who is our customer? 3. What does the customer value? 4. What are our results? 5. What is our plan?

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

Plan, organize, integrate, motivate, and measure.

A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.

What’s measured improves.

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

There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship – the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

Effectiveness must be learned.

Beethoven left behind an enormous number of sketchbooks, yet he said he never actually looked at them. Asked why he kept them, he replied, “If I don’t write it down immediately, I forget it right away. If I put it into a sketchbook, I never forget it and I never have to look it up again.

Your goals should be hard to achieve. But also they should be within reach. To aim at results that cannot be achieved is not being ambitious; it is being foolish.

To be effective in an organization, you must be compatible with the organization’s values.

Use feedback analysis to uncover your strengths and weaknesses.

Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust. The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another. Taking responsibility for relationships is therefore an absolute necessity.

Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values.

To work in an organization whose value system is unacceptable or incompatible with one’s own condemns a person both to frustration and to non-performance

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.

The first is to accept the fact that other people are as much individuals as you yourself are. They perversely insist on behaving like human beings. This means that they too have their strengths; they too have their ways of getting things done; they too have their values. To be effective, therefore, you have to know the strengths, the performance modes, and the values of your coworkers.

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.