Leadership is not magnetic personality--that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not 'making friends and influencing people'--that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
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There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.
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The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.
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The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the MANUAL WORKER in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.
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Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank. Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
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We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.
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One cannot buy, rent or hire more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it. Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time. All work takes place in, and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource.
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Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.
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Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.
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The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society.
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There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
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The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
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The computer is a moron.
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Time is the scarcest resource of the manager; If it is not managed, nothing else can be managed.
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Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
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Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.
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Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change.
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When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
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In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.
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Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.
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My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.
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Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked leadership is defined by results not attributes.
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In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a nonworld.
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People who don't take risks generally make about 2 big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about 2 big mistakes a year.
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The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.
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Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.
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Business, that's easily defined - it's other people's money.
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So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
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The best way to predict the future is to create it.
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The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.
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