Peter Drucker Quotes

The development of our human resources is an area in which we need to do well as it is decisive in determining the success of our diversification programme.

Challenges need to be given to an organization.

I learned from growing a business that it's important to listen to everyone how we can do better.

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

The next thing is: we can make IBM even better. We brought IBM back but we're gunning for leadership.

Most of my work has been in corporations, studying how you build an organization that helps people to identify and work to their strengths.

Managers are trained to make incremental, programmatic improvements. They aren't trained to lead large-scale change.

Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means that you're really fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes.

We started Kotter International to improve leaders' ability to deal with big, important transformations in organizations - and in their lives.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.

It all sounds almost silly, but the fact is that the only way to change a corporate culture is to just change it.

As an owner, you have a choice. Do you want to adopt a vision that you think is real sharp and real cutting edge and could get you from good to great - has a chance - or do you want to just say the organization is not about that, and we're not going to try to adopt a new coaching philosophy and vision.

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

If longevity is the best index to measure a company, a basic requirement is the ability of the corporation to generate new and new leaders.

The one thing we know today is we can't continue to do business the way we have in the past.

The weakness in the company is if we fail to execute.

Instead of being a teacher, I got a job with a company called Bain & Co., consulting firm, and they taught me how to build businesses.

No expectations, no tension between goals and performance, no outrage, resolve or intention, no action, no results. There's only one way to get a government - and a nation - to stop drifting to low performance. That's to wake up and insist on higher standards.

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.

Well, I've ruffled a few feathers at all the institutions I've led. But I think that's part of leadership.

The entrepreneur rarely thinks in terms of what he or she wants, but dreams about results - always results and nothing but results - that can solve someone else's problem or contribute to making someone else's life better.

Most people have a very strong sense of organizational ownership, but I think what people have to own is an innovation agenda, and everything is shared in terms of the implementation.

When you're coming into a company and, you know, have to do a transformation, what you really want to do is look at the company and say, 'Okay, here are the parts that the company does well. How do we get those genes to hyper-express? The genes that are getting in the way, how do you turn those off?'

Culture change means we will do things differently.