Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.
The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it’s dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it.
The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.
No other area offers richer opportunities for successful innovation than the unexpected success.
As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.
If you want to improve how you manage time – stop doing what doesn’t need to be done!
The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society.
If a manager spends more than 10 percent of his time on “human relations” the group is probably too large.
What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady and continuous.
Most of what you hear about entrepreneurshi p is all wrong. It’s not magic; it’s not mysterious; and it has nothing to do with genes. It’s a discipline and, like any discipline, it can be learned.
Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual. They fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.
Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity.
Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise.
To improve communications, work not on the utter, but the recipient.
The paradox of the prophet: his very success is his failure. The prophet whose time has come no longer shocks; he entertains.
It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem – which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.
Information is the manager’s main tool, indeed the manager’s capital, and it is he who must decide what information he needs and how to use it.
Teamwork is neither “good” nor “desirable.” It is a fact. Wherever people work together or play together they do so as a team. Which team to use for what purpose is a crucial, difficult and risky decision that is even harder to unmake. Managements have yet to learn how to make it.