Extracts from 'The World according to Drucker'
by Jack Beatty
The moment people talk of 'implementing' instead of 'doing' and of 'finalising' instead of 'finishing,' the organisation is already running a cancer.
Where the manual laborer expected "a living from work," the knowledge worker expects a life out of it.
The arts alone give direct access to experience.
Decisions on people, are the most important decisions an executive can make.
Alfred Sloan
Lead by action, not exhortation.
I see as central to society and to civilisation the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change.
Look for the figure in the carpet; don't analyse its chemical composition.
The mass of modern politics is akin to a massive cancer that overwhelms the human body even though it only weighs a pound.
It is the nature of knowledge that it changes fast and that today's certainties always become tomorrow's absurdities.
The non-profits spend far less for results than governments spend for failure.
Students without a good deal of experience don't learn anything from me, because I don't learn anything from them.
And as for Keynesian economics, notably its advice to governments to spend their way out of depressions, "It was like a doctor telling you that you have inoperable liver cancer, but it will be cured if you go to bed with a beautiful seventeen-year-old.
Results come from exploiting opportunities, not from solving problems.
Focus on what people can do, not on what they can't do.
Modern government can do only two things well: wage war and inflate the currency.
Keynes and all the brilliant economics students in the room were interested in the behaviour of commodities while I was interested in the behaviour of people.
Keynesian medicine men who inherited their master's prescriptions without having his diagnostic skill are a real menace.
We need a discipline that explains events and phenomena in terms of their direction and future state rather than in terms of cause - a calculus of potential, you might say, rather than one of probability.
One has to accept the need for positive government; one has to consider government action on a sizable scale as desirable rather than a necessary evil.
No society can function as a society unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.
He never gave an opinion on a person, only on his performance.
On Alfred Sloan
The last buggy whip factory was no doubt a model of efficiency.
Get work right and social problems will right themselves.
The major events that determine the future have already happened - irrevocably.
Political freedom is neither easy not automatic, neither pleasant nor secure. It is the responsibility of the individual for the decisions of society as if they were his own decisions - as in moral truth and accountability they indeed are.
Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.
Through systematic terror, through indoctrination, through systematic manipulation of stimulus, reward and punishment, we can today break man and convert him into a brute animal.
Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.
A man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.
Here lies a man
Who knew how to enlist
In his service
Better men than himself.
On Andrew Carnegie's tombstone
The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top-level job who has not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.
Some wit once said maliciously that it puts together and calls personnel management all those things that do not deal with the work of people and that are not management.
It is no accident that there is so much talk in human relations about 'giving workers a sense of responsibility' and so little about their responsibility, so much emphasis on their 'feeling of importance' and so little on making them and their work important.
It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, the enterprise must demand it of him.
The worker does not need praise or reproach to know how he is doing, he knows.
In our society of organisations, it is the job through which the great majority has access to achievement, to fulfillment and to community.
Alfred P. Sloan forward the executives Drucker has observed "shared nothing in common except the ability the get the right thing done."
Effective executives live by the credo "Know Thy Time." They do not start with their tasks; "They start with their time."
Effective executives focus on results, which are outside, in the mercurial world of the customer, not on work, which happens inside.
The strength of the computer lies in it being a logic machine. It does precisely what it is programmed to do. This makes it fast and precise. It also makes it a total moron; for logic is essentially stupid.
Until we recognise that global competition has as much to do with the quality of our own government as it does with the efficiency of our corporations, we are likely to continue lagging behind other democracies in pursuing the goals that matter most.
Any institute degenerates into mediocrity and malperformance if it is not clearly accountable to someone for results.
Innovation - that is, entrepreneurship that moves resources from the old and obsolescent to new and more productive employments - it is the very essence of economics and most certainly of a modern economy.
Schumpeter
The essence of entrepreneurship is doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done.
The stepladder is gone, and there is not even the implied structure of an industry's rope ladder. It's more like vines and you bring your own machete.
On Career Paths
Leaders lead by the infectious example of integrity, not by charisma.
Management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege, it is so much more than "making deals." Management affects people and their lives.
I have now reached the age where I know that it not enough to be remembered for books and theories. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in people's lives.
Schumpeter
I believe in free markets, having seen far too much of the alternative.