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19 Peter Drucker Quotes to Inspire You in 2019

The new year is already more than two weeks old. As I have done periodically, t’s time for another curation of Peter Drucker’s quotes to help you power through the work week, weekend, and return to throughout the year. Whether or not you’ve made new year’s resolutions, Drucker’s words of wisdom will help you get and stay on track in 2019:

1. “You have to make something different out of yourself, rather than just find a new supply of energy.” – Drucker on Asia, 1995
2. “It is futile to try to guess what products and processes the future will want. But it is possible to make up one’s mind what idea one wants to make a reality in the future, and to build a different business on such an idea.” – Managing for Results, 1964
3. “Performance in management, therefore, means in large measure doing a good job of preparing today’s business for the future.” – Managing in Turbulent Times, 1980
4. “The time dimension is inherent in management because management is concerned with decisions for action. And action is always aimed at results in the future.” – The Practice of Management, 1954
5. “A manager has the task of creating a true whole that is larger than the sum of its parts.” – Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1974
6. “Learning and teaching are going to be more deeply affected by the new availability of information than any other area of human life.” – The Age of Discontinuity, 1969
7. “Problems go away because someone does something about them.” – Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1974
8. “The task of an executive is not to change human beings. Rather, as the Bible tells us in the parable of the Talents, the task is to multiply performance capacity of the whole by putting to use whatever strength, whatever health, whatever aspiration there is in individuals.” – The Effective Executive, 1967
9. “Yet surely this is a time to make the future- precisely because everything is in flux. This is a time for action.” – Post-Capitalist Society, 1993
10. “The society of organizations forces the individual to ask of himself: “Who am I?” “What do I want to be?” “What do I want to put into life and what do I want to get out of it?” – The Age of Discontinuity, 1969
11. “For the first time in human history, individuals can expect to outlive organizations. This creates a totally new challenge: What to do with the second half of one’s life?” – Management Challenges for the 21st Century, 1999
12. “The most effective road to self-renewal is to look for the unexpected success and run with it.” – Managing the Non-Profit Organization, 1990
13. “There are constant pressures toward unproductive and wasteful time-use.” – The Effective Executive, 1967
14. “Leadership is not a quantitative term.” – Managing for Results, 1964
15. “Amazingly few people know how they get things done.” – Management Challenges for the 21st Century, 1999
16. “Society needs a return to spiritual values-not to offset the material but to make it fully productive.” – Landmarks of Tomorrow, 1959
17. “Innovation is not a technical term. It is an economic and social term.” – Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1985
18. “Prior to the 19th century, there were almost no channels of social mobility.” – The New Realities, 1989
19. “As with every other institution, the survival and successful functioning of the corporation depends on the solution of three interdependent problems: the problem of leadership, the problem of basic policy, and the problem of objective criteria of conduct and decision.” – The Concept of the Corporation, 1946

If you’ve been inspired by these words, be sure to look for the quotes I post every day on Twitter!

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