17 Peter F. Drucker Quotes on Work

Peter F. Drucker quotes on work

3. Knowing Yourself ...We also seldom know what gifts we are not endowed with. We will have to learn where we belong, what we have to learn to get the full benefit from our strengths, where our weaknesses lie, what our values are. We also have to know ourselves temperamentally: 'Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? What am I committed to? And what is my contribution?' -- Managing Knowledge Means Managing Oneself Leader to Leader, No. 16 (Spring 2000)

8. ...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. -- A cantankerous interview with Peter Drucker, Wired (August 1996)

9. That people even in well paid jobs choose ever earlier retirement is a severe indictment of our organizations -- not just business, but government service, the universities. These people don't find their jobs interesting. -- The Shape of Things to Come: An Interview with Peter F. Drucker Leader to Leader, No. 1 (Summer 1996)

17. If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the 'bourgeois' under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource. -- Post-Capitalist Society (1993)

19. A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant--and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates. -- Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992)

20. The subordinate's job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual. -- Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992)

21. Keep the boss aware. Bosses, after all, are held responsible by their own bosses for the performance of their subordinates. They must be able to say: 'I know what Anne [or John] is trying to do.' -- Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992)

22. Never underrate the boss! The boss may look illiterate. He may look stupid. But there is no risk at all in overrating a boss. If you underrate him he will bitterly resent it or impute to you the deficiency in brains and knowledge you imputed to him. -- Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992)

23. Once a year ask the boss, 'What do I or my people do that helps you to do your job?' and 'What do I or my people do that hampers you?' -- Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992)

24. One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work. That is why there is an enormous surge in the number of unpaid staff, volunteers. The needs are not going to go away. Business is not going to take up the slack, and government cannot. -- 'New Priorities' Dancing Toward The Future, Context Institute, (1992)

25. Ideas are somewhat like babies--they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, 'This is a damn-fool idea.' Instead they ask, 'What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?' -- The Frontiers of Management (1986)

38. 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. -- Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959)

47. It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people: a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are told. -- The Practice of Management (1954)

48. It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, ...The enterprise must demand it of him. -- The Practice of Management (1954)

50. 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. -- The Practice of Management (1954)

54. That the government's power under the Taft-Hartley Act to stop a strike by injunction so clearly strengthens the hand of the employer--even though it is used only when a strike threatens the national health, welfare, or safety--is a grave blemish and explains much of union resistance to the Act. -- The New Society (1950)

86. What is the point of spending such huge sums to bring a 200-lb.-body downtown when all you want of it is its eight-and-a-half pound brain?