IDEAS FOR LEADERS: Some ‘Timeless’ Wisdoms from Peter Drucker

Thanks to Jamie Chapman

• Management fads are a substitute for thinking

• Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision

• The leaders of the past knew how to tell; the leader of the future will know how to ask

• One cannot manage change.  One can only be ahead of it.

• Ideas are somewhat like babies – they are born small, immature, and shapeless.  They are promises rather than fulfillment.

• It is easy to look good in a boom.

• Don’t subscribe to the contention that innovation can be achieved through committees.

• It is who get promoted that tells most about what a company stands for.

• There are no irrational customers, only lazy merchants and manufacturers.

• Prepare two separate budgets: a detailed one consisting of expenses and a concise one focusing on opportunities.

• Institutions, systems and policies eventually outlive themselves, as do products processes, and services.  They do it when they accomplish their objectives, and they do it when they fail to accomplish their objectives.

• Increasingly, performance in the new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institution to attract, hold and motivate knowledge workers.

• Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation

• Success always makes obsolete the very behavior that achieved it.  It always creates new realities. It always creates, above all, its own and different problems.  Only the fairy tale ends “They lived happily ever after.”

IDEAS FOR LEADERS is a collaborative Blog providing ideas from experienced leaders to improve organizations.