Peter Drucker Quotes

Managers tend to treat organizations as if they are infinitely plastic. They hire and fire, merge, downsize, terminate programs, add capacities. But there are limits to the shifts that organizations can absorb.

A declining institution often experiences survival of the unfittest.

In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.

Any great organization can go through sectarian phases.

We live under the illusion that organizations are 'them' when, in reality, they are 'us.' If we wish to work in evolved organizations, we must each be the first to start the journey.

We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.

Today's environment is beginning to threaten today's organizations, finding them seriously deficient in their nervous system design... The degree of coordination, perception, rational adaptation, etc., which will appear in the next generation of human organizations will drive our present organizational forms, with their clumsy nervous systems, into extinction.

Well, years and years ago, I started to ask myself three very simple questions, which dominated my life for many years. One of them was, "Why are organizations everywhere, whether commercial, social, or religious, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?" The second question was, "Why are individuals throughout the world increasingly in conflict with and alienated from the organizations of which they're a part?" And the third was, "Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?"

The organization that can't communicate can't change, and the corporation that can't change is dead.

Organizations cannot make a genius out of an incompetent. On the other hand, disorganization can scarcely fail to result in efficiency.

When an office begins to look like a family tree, you'll find worms tucked away snug and cheerful in most of the apples.

The vast majority of organizations today have more than enough intelligence, experience and knowledge to be successful. What they lack is organizational health.

When you're really trying to make serious change, you don't want people to get caught up in emotion because change isn't emotion. Because change isn't emotion. Its real work and organization and strategy - that's just the truth of it. I mean, you pull people in with inspiration, but then you have to roll up your sleeves and you've got to make sacrifices and you have got to have structure.

You just go through a certain kind of drudgery every time you have to look for something. I've got certain things grouped by now, but there's a drudgery in finding them. There's always stuff missing.

Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.

Change the leader, change the organization.

Innovation- any new idea-by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires courageous patience.

If the CEO's behavior is 95 per cent healthy while the rest of the organization is only 50 per cent sound, it is more effective to focus on that crucial and leveraged 5 per cent that makes up the reminder of the CEO's behavior.

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence ... in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties ... Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

All the great organizations have great managers at all levels who recognize where their culture is getting stronger and where it is getting weaker. There are always reasons why.

People in any organization, including bureaucrats and politicians, are always attached to the obsolete; the obsolescent; the things that should have worked but didn't; the things that once were productive and no longer are.

A committee of three gets things done if two dont show up.

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either.

Traditionally, the role of the individual was to conform to the organization. In the future the organization will have to conform to the needs of the individual.

I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.