Top 500 Peter F. Drucker Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Leadership Quotes

2. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

— Peter F. Drucker

3. “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Success Quotes, Leadership Quotes

4. “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

— Peter F. Drucker

5. “It’s more important to do the right thing than to do things right.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Integrity Quotes

6. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”

— Peter F. Drucker

7. “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Quality Quotes

8. “Do what you do best, and outsource the rest.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Humor Quotes

9. “Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.”

— Peter F. Drucker

10. “Business has only two basic functions – marketing and innovation.”

— Peter F. Drucker

11. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t change it.”

— Peter F. Drucker

12. “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”

— Peter F. Drucker

13. “Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.”

— Peter F. Drucker

14. “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Business Quotes

15. “Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Teamwork Quotes

16. “If you want to predict the future create it.”

— Peter F. Drucker

17. “Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Opportunity Quotes, Appreciation Quotes

18. “Marketing is not a function, it is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view.”

— Peter F. Drucker

19. “The real achiever do one thing at a time.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Real Quotes

20. “There are only two things in a business that make money – innovation and marketing, everything else is cost.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Innovation Quotes, Marketing Quotes

21. “People learn the most when teaching others.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Teaching Quotes

22. “The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system’s weaknesses irrelevant.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Strong Quotes

23. “Leadership is an achievement of trust.”

— Peter F. Drucker

24. “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Wise Quotes, Peace Quotes

25. “Mission defines strategy, and strategy defines structure.”

— Peter F. Drucker

26. “Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Productivity Quotes

27. “The race for Quality has no finish line – so technically, it’s more like a death march. Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Quality Quotes

28. “A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Focus Quotes

29. “If you want it, measure it. If you can’t measure it, forget it.”

— Peter F. Drucker

30. “What’s measured improves.”

— Peter F. Drucker

31. “The ultimate resource in economic development is people. It is people, not capital or raw materials that develop an economy.”

— Peter F. Drucker

32. “Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable.”

— Peter F. Drucker

33. “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Leadership Quotes

34. “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Marketing Quotes, Loyalty Quotes

35. “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”

— Peter F. Drucker

36. “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.”

— Peter F. Drucker

37. “Long range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Future Quotes

38. “The critical question is not “How can I achieve?” but “What can I contribute?””

— Peter F. Drucker

39. “Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.”

— Peter F. Drucker

40. “Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Wise Quotes, Boss Quotes

41. “Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.”

— Peter F. Drucker

42. “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it’s selling.”

— Peter F. Drucker

43. “There is nothing worse than doing the wrong thing well.”

— Peter F. Drucker

44. “You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths.”

— Peter F. Drucker

45. “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”

— Peter F. Drucker

46. “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two and only two functions: Marketing and Innovation. Marketing and Innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Innovation Quotes, Marketing Quotes

47. “Do first things first, and second things not at all.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

48. “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Featured in: Marketing Quotes

49. “One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.”

— Peter F. Drucker

50. “If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.”

— Peter F. Drucker