The famous management consultant, Peter Drucker, has left a legacy of writing books that have shaped the way many organizations operate.
Peter Drucker was a German-born American management consultant. He is most noted for his contributions to modern management theory and practice, especially for his advocacy that the key to effective organizational performance is effective leadership.
On November 20th, 1909, he was born in Switzerland, where he attended college and studied economics and political science at the University of Zurich from 1925–1928. In 1945 he received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna with a dissertation titled “The Concept of Time in History.” In 1949 he wrote “Managers: What Managers Are and How They Function,” which was published while working as an editor at Harvard Business
Here are 67 Inspirational Peter Drucker Quotes on Success
1. “Success? Odd as it seems, you will achieve the greatest results in business and career if you drop the word ‘achievement’ from your vocabulary and replace it with ‘contribution’.” ― Peter Drucker
2. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” ― Peter Drucker
3. “Defending yesterday is far more risky than making tomorrow.” ― Peter Drucker
4. “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.” ― Peter Drucker
5. “A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.” ― Peter Drucker
6. “Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.” ― Peter Drucker
7. “Ideas are like frog eggs: you’ve got to lay a thousand to hatch one.” ― Peter Drucker
8. “Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity.” ― Peter Drucker
9. “It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.” ― Peter Drucker
10. “The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.” ― Peter Drucker
11. “What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or a service does for the customer.” ― Peter Drucker
12. “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it’s selling.” ― Peter Drucker
13. “To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.” ― Peter Drucker
14. “Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.” ― Peter Drucker
15. “Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant
16. “A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.” ― Peter Drucker
17. “Ideas are cheap and abundant; what is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.” ― Peter Drucker
18. “Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
19. “The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.” ― Peter Drucker
20. “You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.” ― Peter Drucker
21. “Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.” ― Peter Drucker
22. “Don’t try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present!” – Peter Drucker
23. “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.” ― Peter Drucker
24. “Do not measure your life by your goals but what you are doing to achieve them.” ― Peter Drucker
25. “Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.” ― Peter Drucker
26. “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?” – Peter Drucker
27. “Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.” ― Peter Drucker
28. “Every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.” ― Peter Drucker
29. “Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.” ― Peter Drucker
30. “Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.” ― Peter Drucker
31. “Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable.” ― Peter Drucker
32. “Our job in life is to make a positive difference, not prove we’re right.” ― Peter Drucker
33. “Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes… but no plans.” ― Peter Drucker
34. “To make a living is no longer enough. Work also has to make a life.” ― Peter Drucker
35. “The better a man is the more mistakes he will make for the more things he will try.” ― Peter Drucker
36. “No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.” ― Peter Drucker
37. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” ― Peter Drucker
38. “Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.” ― Peter Drucker
39. “Most innovators are successful to the extent to which they define risks and confine them.” ― Peter Drucker
40. “Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.” ― Peter Drucker
41. “Do what you do best, and outsource the rest.” ― Peter Drucker
42. “It’s amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed.” ― Peter Drucker
43. “If you have more than five goals, you have none.” ― Peter Drucker
44. “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” ― Peter Drucker
45. “Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.” ― Peter Drucker
46. “We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out.” ― Peter Drucker
47. “To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent.” ― Peter Drucker
48. “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” ― Peter Drucker
49. “People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.” ― Peter Drucker
50. “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.” ― Peter Drucker
51. “The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.” ― Peter Drucker
52. “What gets measured gets improved.” ― Peter Drucker
53. “Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen.” ― Peter Drucker
54. “What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that’s another matter.” ― Peter Drucker
55. “There are two types of people in the business community: those who produce results and those who give you reasons why they didn’t.” ― Peter Drucker
56. “If you’re not living life on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.” ― Peter Drucker
57. “To make the future demands courage. It demands work. But it also demands faith.” ― Peter Drucker
58. “Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.” ― Peter Drucker
59. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.” ― Peter Drucker
60. “People who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs.” ― Peter Drucker
61. “It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.” ― Peter Drucker
62. “Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.” ― Peter Drucker
63. “The most effective way to manage change is to create it.” ― Peter Drucker
64. The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” ― Peter Drucker
65. “Time is the scarcest resource of the manager; If it is not managed, nothing else can be managed.” ― Peter Drucker
66. Vision without execution is delusion. The joy is in the results.” ― Peter Drucker
67. “No one has ever failed to find the facts they are looking for.” ― Peter Drucker
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