Peter Drucker Quotes

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations

Any leader needs to be constantly interested in what's going on in the world, and constantly ready - even when things are going well - to change.

Strategy is, at some level, the ability to predict what's going to happen, but it's also about understanding the context in which it is being formulated. And then you have to be open-minded to the fact that you're not going to get it right at the very beginning.

The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for the future, and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas.

It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work.

Foresight is not about predicting the future, it's about minimizing surprise.

Plan B. You've always got to have a Plan B.

In great affairs we ought to apply ourselves less to creating chances than to profiting from those that offer.

You take an educated gamble. If you don't occasionally make a mistake, you're not doing your job.

Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape. It never goes away.

But I don't bet the farm on any of those possibilities, either. I'm also preparing, intelligently, to walk away from this, and walk away from it happy to have had the experience.

I'd say that, to be a good deal maker, you have to have 3 basic characteristics - timing, timing, and timing.

The No. 1 criticism most managers get is that they don't ever change or wait too long to make changes... It's very simple: Either things are performing or they're not. And if it's not performing, we have to make changes.

Founders go wrong when they start to believe their business plan will materialize as written. I advise entrepreneurs to burn their business plan - it's simply too dangerous to the health of your business.

Well, you know, any defense force worth its salt has to be able to deal with uncertainty, has to be able to deal with events that we may not have planned for.

But I also think that the more you reason collectively about what the project should be at the beginning of the process, the more you can improvise later.

You make the right decision for the long run. You manage for the long run, and you continue to move to higher value. That's what I think my job is.

The essence of good business is knowing when to step on a train and when to step off.

Nobody has a crystal ball, and part of evolving a business plan is to say, 'I might have said we're going left, but I see the opportunity and we're going right.'

Remember, the goal of structured futures thinking is to come up with a picture of possible futures that will help to inform strategic decisions.

I never stop to plan. I take things step by step.

I wait and take on projects that I think can work.

No plan can prevent a stupid person from doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time - but a good plan should keep a concentration from forming.

We can't continue to always base our strategy on the fact that the other guy is going to mess up all the time.

The challenge of our times is to leave nothing to chance.