"The leader of the past
knew how to tell. The leader of the future will know how to ask."
"Leaders need to be
willing to start with the question, 'What needs to be done'"
Leaders:
Effective leaders are not preachers, they are doers."
- Peter Drucker
There
is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer...
Peter Drucker
"What matters is not
the leader's charisma. For leadership is not a magnetic
personality--that can just as well be demagoguery. It is not
"making friends and influencing people" - that is flattery.
Leadership is the lifting
of a man's vision to higher sights, the raising of a man's personality
beyond its normal limitations."
"Management
is doing the right thing. Leadership is doing things
right."
"Effective
leaders delegate, but they do not delegate the one thing that will set
the standards, they do it."
"Management
by objectives works, if you first think through your objectives."
"To
know one's strengths, to know how to improve them, and to know what
one cannot do are the keys to continuous learning."
"Those
who perform love what they are doing."
"I always ask the same three questions whether I'm dealing with a business, a church or a university. And whether it's American, German, or Japanese makes no difference.
- The first question is: what is your business? What are you trying to accomplish? What makes you distinct?
- The second question is: How do you define results? And that's a very tough question, much tougher in a non-business than in a business.
- The third question is: What are your core competencies? And what do they have to do with results?
That's all really. There is no great difference between this century and the last except there are so many more organisations today."
---- Peter Drucker in an NPR interview and New Zealand Management (October, 2005)
"Work
we know is both a burden and a need, both a curse and a
blessing. But work is an extension of personality. It is
an achievement. It is one of the ways a person defines himself
or herself, measure his worth and his humanity."
"The
great majority of people tend to focus downward. They are
occupied with efforts rather than results. They worry over what
the organization and their superiors 'owe' them and should do for
them. And they are conscious above all of the authority they
'should have.' As a result they render themselves
ineffectual."
"The
Responsible Worker is a worker who not only is accountable for
specific results but also has authority to do whatever is necessary to
produce the results and, finally, is committed to these results as a
personal achievement."
Theory
of the business: (Five questions)
-
What
is the mission?
-
Who
is the customer?
-
What
does the customer value?
-
What
are our results?
-
What
is our plan?
"Marketing is to know
the customer well enough to develop products that sell themselves."
"Selling is tied no
longer to production but to distribution."
"Looking for the
future that has already happened and anticipating its impact
introduces new perception to the beholder."
"Predicting the
future can only get you into trouble. The task is to manage what
is there and to work to create what could and should be."
"Because it is the
purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two and only
two basic functions: marketing and innovation"
"Entrepreneurs see
change as the norm and as healthy. Usually they do not bring
about the change themselves. But - and this defines the
entrepreneur and entrepreneurship - the entrepreneur always
searches for change, responds to it and exploits it as an
opportunity."
"The final question
needed in order to come to grips with business purpose and business
mission is: "What is the value to the
customer?" It may be the most important
question. Yet it is the least often asked. One reason is
that managers are quite sure that they know the answer."
