Quote collection
592 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I would hope that American managers-indeed, managers worldwide-continue to appreciate what I have been saying almost from day one: that management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege, that it is much more than "making deals." Management affects people and their lives."
"The Pertinent Question is NOT how to do things right - but how to find the right things to do, and to concentrate resources and efforts on them."
"Any time I have seen someone accomplishing something magnificent, they have been a monomaniac with a mission. A single-minded individual with a passion."
"Quality of character doesn't make a leader, but the lack of it flaws the entire process."
""The area in which the executive first encounters the challenge of strength is in staffing. The effective executive fills positions and promotes on the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to minimize weaknesses but to maximize strength.""
"The single minded ones, the monomaniacs, are the only true achievers"
"Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order... catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society."
"Unless we realize that the essence of Nazism is also an attempt to solve a universal problem of Western civilization - that of the industrial society - and that the basic principles on which the Nazis base this attempt are also in no way confined to Germany, we do not know what we fight for or what we fight against... The war is being fought for the structure of industrial society - its basic principles, its purposes, and its institutions."
"Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things."
"No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary people perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each person's strength to help all the other members perform."
"To arrive at the definition of the problem he must begin by finding the 'critical factor'. This is the element (or elements) in the situation that has to be changed before anything else can be changed, moved, acted upon."
"Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management."
"The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is ... to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker"
"Financial "synergy" is a will-o'-the-wisp.It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice."
"Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing."
"[Entrepreneurship] is by no means hunch or gamble. But it also is not precisely science. Rather, it is judgment."
"An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic."
"Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution."
"Leadership is more doing than dash."
"If a manager spends more than 10 percent of his time on "human relations" the group is probably too large."