40 quotes from Peter Drucker who is the father of modern management

Listen first and speak later.

We cannot predict the future, but we can create it.

Simplicity tends to development, complexity to disintegration.

There is nothing so useless as doing with great efficiency something that shouldn’t be done.

Doing the right things is more important than doing the right things.

Long-term planning is not about future decisions, but about the future of present decisions.

Wherever you see a successful business, you can believe that there was once a courageous decision.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be very different from what we imagined.

What can be measured, can be improved.

Too many meetings are symptoms of mismanagement.

There are no underdeveloped countries. There are under-administered countries.

A lot of what we call management is making it hard for people to work.

Making a living is no longer enough. Work has to allow us to live life too.

The only source of profit is the customer.

Successful innovators use both the right and left sides of their brains. They lay eyes on numbers and people.

Every decision is risky: it is a commitment of present resources to an uncertain and unknown future.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what hasn’t been said.

Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.

To be effective, the knowledge worker must first make the right things happen.

As a manager, you get paid to be uncomfortable. If you’re comfortable, it’s a sure sign that you’re doing things wrong.

Results are obtained through exploring opportunities, not solving problems.

The authority of knowledge is certainly as legitimate as the authority of position.

If you want something new, you have to stop doing the old.

Practice systematic abandonment. Things get stale. If it’s to be overcome, let it be by yourself.

Knowledge was a private good, associated with the verb KNOW. Now, it is a public good linked to the verb DO.

There are two types of risks: those we cannot afford to take and those we cannot afford not to take.

A good boss makes ordinary men do unusual things.

Time is your limiting resource, and it is totally unrecoverable in your life.

The seemingly less relevant decisions are of utmost importance for a knowledge-based company.

Knowledge and information are strategic resources for the development of any country. The bearers of these resources are people.

Miracles happen sometimes, but it takes a lot of work to make them happen.

When a subject becomes completely obsolete, it becomes a required subject in college.

The first rule of focus for a manager is to let go of the past that has ceased to be productive.

More risky than change is to keep doing the same thing.

What managers need, in order to be accepted as legitimate authority, is a principle of morality.

Elephants take time to adapt, cockroaches survive in any environment.

All effective managers have in common the ability to make the right things happen.

Management is replacing muscle with thought, folklore and superstition with knowledge, and strength with cooperation.

The problem in our lives is not the absence of knowing what to do, but the absence of doing it.

Effectiveness means making the right things happen.