Peter F. Drucker Quotes

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.

For if this country—or any other of the great powers—were to make its defense program a function of its domestic employment situation, it would become impossible to conduct a constructive and well-thought out foreign policy or to develop any lasting collaboration.

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

The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations; most computer users have found that they now need more, and more expensive clerks, even though they call them "operators" or "programmers.

The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives.

The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.

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

The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.

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.

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.

With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe.

We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.

[J]ustification of power must be the central problem. For it is through this problem alone that freedom and equality—or... justice—can be projected into the social and political reality... But to fascism the problem does not even exist except as a ridiculous relic of "Jewish liberalism.

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

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.