"Adequacy is the enemy of excellence."
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Peter Drucker quotes (page 3 of 30)
592 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization."
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"Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level."
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"Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better."
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"Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don't have enough of it, you're out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you're really missing something."
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"The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless."
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"The "non-profit" institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its "product" is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their "product" is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether."
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"Morale in an organization does not mean that "people get along together"; the test is performance not conformance."
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"Listening (the first competence of leadership) is not a skill, it is a discipline. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut."
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"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."
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"Leaders grow; they are not made."
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"If you can't measure it, you can't change it."
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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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"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."
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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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"The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous."
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"More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject."
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"The purpose of a business is to create a customer."
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"Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined."
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"Once the facts are clear the decisions jump out at you."
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