Peter Drucker Quotes

There's smarter people than me. But you cannot have any one guy running 18 billion-dollar businesses. It just doesn't make sense to me. I've met some extraordinary leaders in my time. They struggle with running one billion-dollar business.

Life inside successful Web startups - especially the really successful ones - can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders.

Admiration takes on a whole new level when you appreciate just how complex it is to run a modern business.

The great myth is the manager as orchestra conductor. It's this idea of standing on a pedestal and you wave your baton and accounting comes in, and you wave it somewhere else and marketing chimes in with accounting, and they all sound very glorious. But management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.

Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals.

Specialized management courses are useful but should come well after the complexity of management and business are understood.

You can be in this business 50 years and still not know anything about it.

It's so easy to make things complicated in business.

Running a company is pretty demanding.

The single hardest part of leading any organization is knowing what is going on. There's too much noise in the system, too much complexity: you absolutely depend on people speaking up and raising concerns.

In human affairs the solution to every problem contains within it the seeds of a new problem.

The chances of catastrophe grow as organizations grow in number and size, and as internal communications become more time consuming and less intelligible.

Size—sheer, unmanageable size—is the root problem [of the State Department] in Washington and overseas today.

WrestleMania is a week-long series of events, and the logistics of executing that week along with the week leading into it and the week after it are extraordinarily difficult in our own back yard.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

I loved multi-tasking. I loved being involved in a lot of things. To me, the more complex the better, and so being a leader of a business to me was like, 'Wow, that's what I want to be.'

Deep learning is a very capital-intensive area, and it's rare to find a company with both the necessary resources and a company structure where things can get done without having to pass through too many channels and committee meetings.

As a former college president, I am well aware that every university is a complicated ecosystem, not a linear widget factory.

I think that the larger and more complex the business gets, I have to listen twice as much as I speak.

As the number of people who work at Basecamp has grown, I've noticed places where we could use more features, like management, structure, and guidelines. I've also noticed places where we've overengineered ourselves and should pull back.

It's not easy putting on a festival, there's a lot of moving parts.

When things get too grand or too big, I struggle to keep up with it all.

Every manager must be prepared to face every situation.

You can't run a multinational business from your desk.

Can a label group by itself scale to make a sensible business? I don't think so.