Peter Drucker

If leaders are unable to slough off yesterday, to abandon yesterday, they simply will not be able to create tomorrow.

Peter Drucker

If something fails despite being carefully planned, carefully designed, and conscientiously executed, that failure often bespeaks underlying change and, with it, opportunity.

Peter Drucker

If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total depression.

Peter Drucker

In actual practice this distinction makes no sense whatever. An enterprise, whether a business or any other institution, that does not innovate and does not engage in entrepreneurship will not survive long.

Peter Drucker

In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.

Peter Drucker

In book subjects a student can only do a student’s work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise.

Peter Drucker

In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a non-world.

Peter Drucker

In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.

Peter Drucker

In the managerial organization, the top people sit in judgment; in the innovative organization it is their job to encourage ideas, no matter how unripe or crude.

Peter Drucker

In the next economic downturn there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the supercorporate chieftains who pay themselves millions. In every major economic downturn in US history the villains have been the heroes during the preceding boom.

Peter Drucker