Peter Drucker quotes for UPSC

...what's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There is no excuse for it. No justification. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we will pay a heavy price for it.

It is not enough for the economist in a free society to be a good economic craftsman; he must also think and act as a citizen.

Management has authority only as long as it performs.

We will have to learn to lead people rather then to contain them.

The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.

The worker's effectiveness is determined largely by the way he is being managed.

A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.

A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.

To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.

The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it.

The fault is in the system and not in the men.

One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.

We do not need more laws. No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model.

A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.

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.

Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.

No matter how deeply wedded one may be to the free enterprise system (and I, for one, am wedded for life), one has to accept the need for positive government; one has to consider government action on a sizable scale as desirable rather than as a necessary evil.

There can be no freedom if one man or one group of men... is assumed... inherently perfect or perfectible. Its claim to perfection or perfectibility is a claim to absolute rule.

A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.

Tomorrow everybody - or practically everybody - will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.

A tool is not necessarily better because it is bigger. A tool is best if it does the job required with a minimum of effort, with a minimum of complexity, and with a minimum of power.

And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.

Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.

The world political system is till based on the concept of the national sovereign state. For the first time therefore, in three hundred years economy and sovereignty are becoming divorced from each other.

Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.

Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity that causes it, this is therefore the best-indeed the only truly good-solution.

...all earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.

The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves...

Profit is not a cause but a result-

It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.

One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.

The major incentive to productivity and efficiency are social and moral rather than financial.

The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.

The fundamental reality for every worker, from sweeper to executive vice-president, is the eight hours or so that he spends on the job. In our society of organizations, it is the job through which the great majority has access to achievement, to fulfillment, and to community.

Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.

The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.

Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.