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.