I didn’t get depressed, I don’t get depressed.

The world political system is till based on the concept of the national sovereign state. For the first time therefore, in three hundred years economy and sovereignty are becoming divorced from each other.

For the first four years, no new enterprise produces profits. Even Mozart didn’t start writing music until he was four.

Introverts do better alone with competition, extraverts do better in large group without competition.

In a rural society communities are “given” for the individual. Community is a fact, whether family or religion, social class or caste.

Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.

Don’t diversify, don’t splinter, don’t try to do too many things at once. This is, of course, the corollary to the ‘do’: be focused!

A recurrent crisis should always have been foreseen. It can therefore either be prevented or reduced to a routine which clerks can manage. The definition of a “routine” is that it makes unskilled people without judgment capable of doing what it took near-genius to do before; for a routine puts down in systematic, step-by-step form what a very able man learned in surmounting yesterday’s crisis. The recurrent crisis is not confined to the lower levels of an organization. It afflicts everyone.

A business enterprise must continue beyond the lifetime of the individual or of the generation to be capable of producing its contributions to economy and to society.

When the business grows, the person who founded it is incredibly busy. Rapid growth puts an enormous strain on a business. You outgrow your production facilities. You outgrow your management capabilities.

Organizationally what is required – and evolving – is systems management.

No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone’s work assignment and responsibility.

The truly important events on the outside are not the trends. They are changes in the trends. These determine ultimately success or failure of an organization and its efforts. Such changes, however, have to be perceived; they cannot be counted, defined, or classified. The classifications still produce the expected figures – as they did for the Edsel. But the figures no longer correspond to actual behavior.

Any existing organization, whether a business, a church, a labor union, or a hospital, goes down fast if it does not innovate. Conversely, any new organization, whether a business, a church, a labor union, or a hospital, collapses if it does not manage. Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures.

If a business is to be considered a continuous process, instead of a series of disjointed stop-and-go events, then the economic universe in which a business operates-and all the major events within it-must have rhyme, rhythm, or reason.

During periods of discontinuous, abrupt change, the essence of adaptation involves a keen sensitivity to what should be abandoned – not what should be changed or introduced. A willingness to depart from the familiar has distinct survival value.

The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader’s charisma. What matters is the leader’s mission.

In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers, is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power.

I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information.

All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.

A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.

The enterprise can fulfill its human and social functions only if it prospers as a business.

Tomorrow everybody – or practically everybody – will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.

Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.

It has been said, and only half in jest, that a tough, professionally led union is a great force for improving management performance. It forces the manager to think about what he is doing and to be able to explain his actions and behavior.

There are no creeds in mathematics.

We will have to learn to lead people rather then to contain them.

The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.

But what stands out in Japanese history, as well as in today’s Japanese management behavior, is the capacity for making 180-degree turns – that is, for reaching radical and highly controversial decisions.

The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.

Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates a resource. There is no such thing as a ‘resource’ until man finds a use for something in nature and thus endows it with economic value. Until then, every plant is a weed and every mineral just another rock.

As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel.

What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can’t be very good.

It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.

One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work.

I have no interest in celebrities. If all the superrich disappeared, the world economy would not even notice. The superrich are irrelevant to the economy.

Finally, don’t try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present! An innovation may have long-range impact; it may not reach its full maturity until twenty years later.

The most critical case in a corporation, especially a big one, is when everything goes well, when you have accomplished your objectives. When the temptation is to work twice as hard instead of saying, “We have accomplished our objectives, we have to think again.

Mother Teresa’s numerical results were not her greatest contribution. Instead, she made the world-and especially India-conscious of compassion.

The healthier a new venture and the faster it grows, the more financial feeding it requires.

I’m a writer. I could not or would not ever run a business. I don’t even have a secretary. And contrary to some of the stereotypes, entrepreneurs are not loners. I am.

Around here, I am only the guy who is responsible. If these men don’t know what to do when they run into an enemy in the jungle, I’m too far away to tell them. My job is to make sure they know. What they do depends on the situation which only they can judge. The responsibility is always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot.” In.

We have tried to substitute mass for purpose. We have tried to regain military potency of defense by making it gigantic, unwieldy, complex. It never works.

Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity that causes it, this is therefore the best-indeed the only truly good-solution.

The subordinate’s job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual.

If a government commission had worked on the horse, you would have the first horse that could operate its knee joint in both directions. The trouble is it couldn’t have stood up.

Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!

When Henry Ford said, “The customer can have a car in any color as long as it’s black,” he was not joking.

Measuring requires, first and foremost, analytical ability. But it also demands that measurement be used to make self-control possible, rather than abused to control people from the outside and above – that is, to dominate them.

We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.

Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.

Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.

People alone of all the resources can grow and develop.

We always remember best the irrelevant.

The computer actually may have aggravated management’s degenerative tendency to focus inward on costs.

Each member of the enterprise contributes something different, but they must all contribute toward a common goal.

The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, “If we assign this general to lead this base, what do we expect him to accomplish?

If a manager spends more than 10 percent of his time on “human relations” the group is probably too large.

It is willingness of people to give of themselves over and above the demands of the job that distinguishes the great from the merely adequate.

Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?

If “socialism” is defined as “ownership of the means of production” – and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition – then the United States is the first truly Socialist country.

And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today’s big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.

Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.

Management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.

The fundamental reality for every worker, from sweeper to executive vice-president, is the eight hours or so that he spends on the job. In our society of organizations, it is the job through which the great majority has access to achievement, to fulfillment, and to community.

The moment people talk of “implementing” instead of “doing,” and of “finalizing” instead of “finishing,” the organization is already running a fever.

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

There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology, society, economy, and institutions .

Salvation by society failed the most where it promised the most, in the communist countries. But it also failed in the West. Practically no government program enacted since the 1950s in the Western world – or in the communist countries – has been successful.

Thus, for those who are willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovation opportunity.

The new always looks so puny-so unpromising-next to the reality of the massive, ongoing business.

Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual. They fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

Our society has become an employee society.

You should not change yourself, but create yourself, that mean build around your strengths and removing bad habits.

One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.

Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don’t know what I’m going to be when I grow up.

Management and entrepreneurship are only two different dimensions of the same task. An entrepreneur who does not learn how to manage will not last long. A management that does not learn to innovate will not last long.

The earlier changes are discerned, the earlier the opportunities they create can be converted into innovations.

A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.

The Welfare State, which begun in Imperial Germany for the truly indigent and disabled, has now become “everybody’s entitlement” and an increasing burden on those who produce.

Management and union may be likened to that serpent of the fables who on one body had two heads that fighting each other with poisoned fangs, killed themselves.

The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.

Knowledge has become the key resource of the world economy.

Unless a decision has degenerated into work, it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.

I no longer think that learning how to manage people, especially subordinates, is the most important for executives to learn. I am teaching above all else, how to manage oneself.

We can ill afford to have activities conducted as “non-profit,” that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.

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.

That people even in well paid jobs choose ever earlier retirement is a severe indictment of our organizations – not just business, but government service, the universities. These people don’t find their jobs interesting.

The dilemma of modern society: the conflict between the need for capital formation at a high rate and the popular condemnation of interest and dividends as “unearned income” and “capitalist,” if not as sinful and wicked.

Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.

Business exists to supply goods and services to customers and economic surplus to society, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers or even dividends to shareholders.

Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past.

Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.

The building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

Don’t take on things you don’t believe in and that you yourself are not good at. Learn to say no. Effective leaders match the objective needs of their company with the subjective competencies. As a result, they get an enormous amount of things done fast.

When a resource is scarce, you increase its yield.

The enterprise, by definition, must be capable of producing more or better than all the resources that comprise it.

It’s up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.

Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.

Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.

The paradox of the prophet: his very success is his failure. The prophet whose time has come no longer shocks; he entertains.

A man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths. The man who always knows exactly what people cannot do, but never sees anything they can do, will undermine the spirit of his organization.

An employer has no business with a man’s personality. The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.

The oft-repeated quip, “I’m sorry to write you a long letter, as I did not have time to write a short one,” could be applied to meetings: “I’m sorry to imprison you in this long meeting, as I did not have time to prepare a short one.

Adversarial power relationships only work if you never have to see or work with the bastards again.

Most of what you hear about entrepreneurshi p is all wrong. It’s not magic; it’s not mysterious; and it has nothing to do with genes. It’s a discipline and, like any discipline, it can be learned.

A well-managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory that is “dramatic,” a factory in which the “epic of industry” is unfolded before the visitor’s eyes, is poorly managed. A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.

A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.

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

The company is not and must never claim to be home, family, religion, life or fate for the individual. It must never interfere in his private life or his citizenship. He is tied to the company through a voluntary and cancellable employment contract, not through some mystical or indissoluble bond.

The corporation is the “master”, the employee is the “servant”. Because the corporation owns the means of production without which the employee could not make a living, the employee needs the corporation more than vice versa.

To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.

The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it.

Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.

There is one qualification the manager cannot acquire but must bring to the task. It is not genius; it is character.

The individual needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of his Creator and subject to Him.

Culture eats Christianity for breakfast.

Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise.

The single minded ones, the monomaniacs, are the only true achievers.

Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.

An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.

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

Institutions mistake good intentions for objectives. They say “health care”; that’s an intention, not an objective.

The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.

For the social ecologist language is not “communication.” It is not just “message.” It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communication. Social ecologists need not be “great” writers; but they have to be respectful writers, caring writers.

One either meets or one works.

Far too much reorganization goes on all the time. Organizitis is like a spastic colon.

Shoes are real. Money is an end result.

I have been saying for many years that we are using the word ‘guru’ only because ‘charlatan’ is too long to fit into a headline.

Follow these five decision steps when hiring someone: Understand the job, consider three to five people, study candidates performance records to find their strengths, talk to the candidates’ colleagues about them, and once hired, explain the assignment to the new employee.

The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.

By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else. Here, therefore, is the one area where weakness is a disqualification by itself rather than a limitation on performance capacity and strength.

The monomaniac is unlikely to succeed. Most leave only their bleached bones in the roadless desert. But the rest of us, with our multiple interests instead of a single mission, are certain to fail and have no impact at all.

Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.

If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the “bourgeois” under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource.

Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.

Never underrate the boss! The boss may look illiterate. He may look stupid. But there is no risk at all in overrating a boss. If you underrate him he will bitterly resent it or impute to you the deficiency in brains and knowledge you imputed to him.

No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.

If general perception changes from seeing the glass as ‘half-full’ to seeing it as ‘half empty’ there are major innovative opportunities.

Teamwork is neither “good” nor “desirable.” It is a fact. Wherever people work together or play together they do so as a team. Which team to use for what purpose is a crucial, difficult and risky decision that is even harder to unmake. Managements have yet to learn how to make it.

Tomorrow always arrives. It is always different. And even the mightiest company is in trouble if it has not worked on the future. Being surprised by what happens is a risk that even the largest and richest company cannot afford, and even the smallest business need not run.

Objectives can be compared to a compass bearing by which a ship navigates. A compass bearing is firm, but in actual navigation, a ship may veer off its course for many miles. Without a compass bearing, a ship would neither find its port nor be able to estimate the time required to get there.

What makes demographics such a rewarding opportunity for the entrepreneur is precisely its neglect by decision makers, whether businessmen, public-service staffs, or governmental policymakers. They still cling to the assumption that demographics do not change – or do not change fast. Indeed, they reject even the plainest evidence of demographic changes.

The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.

The action plan is a statement of intentions rather than a commitment. It must not become a straitjacket. It should be revised often, because every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.

No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real.

People are effective because they say ‘no,’ because they say, ‘this isn’t for me.

Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution.

There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Entrepreneurs see change as the norm and as healthy. Usually, they do not bring about the change themselves. But – and this defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship – the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results.

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.

Decisions exist only in the present.

A manager’s task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant – and that applies fully as much to the manager’s boss as it applies to the manager’s subordinates.

Never ask who’s right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.

Everyone can make the wrong decision – in fact, everyone will sometimes make a wrong decision. But no one needs to make a decision which, on its face, falls short of satisfying the boundary conditions.

Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people – and allow people to place themselves – according to their strengths.

A fundamental responsibility of leadership is make sure that everybody knows the mission, understands it, lives it.

Some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I’ve worked with over a sixty-five-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses.

An organization which just perpetuates today’s level of vision, excellence, and accomplishment has lost the capacity to adapt.

Managers are agents of transformation, converting the workforce in developed countries from one of manual workers to one of highly educated knowledge workers.

We do not need more laws. No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model .

The success and ultimately the survival of every business, large or small, depends in the last analysis on its ability to develop people. This ability is not measured by any of our conventional yardsticks of economic success; yet, is the final measurement.

The only industries that function well are the industries that take responsibility for training. The Japanese, you know, assume that when you first come to work you know absolutely nothing. School isn’t preparation for work and never was.

Schools will change more in the next 30 years than they have since the invention of the printed book.

An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the ‘naturals,’ the ones who somehow know how to teach.

Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.

It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, The enterprise must demand it of him.

Education can no longer be the sole property of the state.

The correct assumption is that what individuals have learned by age twenty-one will begin to become obsolete five to ten years later and will have to be replaced-or at least refurbished-by new learning, new skills, new knowledge.

We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad. We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order. We see change as being order itself-indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one.

One does not start with facts. One starts with opinions.

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

We can say with certainty – or 90% probability – that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.

Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen.

But there seems to be little correlation between a man’s effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination or his knowledge.

Important decisions are risky. They should be controversial. Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework.

Yet there is nothing more dangerous than to be premature in exploiting a change in perception.

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

Successful leaders don’t start out asking, ‘What do I want to do?’ They ask, ‘What needs to be done?’ Then they ask, ‘Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?

The strength of the computer lies in its being a logic machine. It does precisely what it is programed to do. This makes it fast and precise. It also makes it a total moron; for logic is essentially stupid.

The fault is in the system and not in the men.

The computer, being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data.

The one person to distrust is the one who never makes a mistake. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.

Providing more desirable products, services, and customer experiences is vital to the continued existence of any business. And that is INNOVATION.

Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.

With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe.