What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter.
The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today’s society.
The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.
There is a point at which a transformation has to take place.
With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe.
Long range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.
Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.
Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. SO for more than 60 years I have kept studying one subject at a time.
The fault is in the system and not in the men.
In book subjects a student can only do a student’s work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise.
Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are a means to mobilize resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.
Tomorrow everybody – or practically everybody – will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.
The fundamental reality for every worker, from sweeper to executive vice-president, is the eight hours or so that he spends on the job. In our society of organizations, it is the job through which the great majority has access to achievement, to fulfillment, and to community.
In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers, is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power.
A manager sets objectives – A manager organizes – A manager motivates and communicates – A manager, by establishing yardsticks, measures – A manager develops people .
Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution.
Management and union may be likened to that serpent of the fables who on one body had two heads that fighting each other with poisoned fangs, killed themselves.
We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.
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.
Results is all that separates one company from another.