As a follow-up to my January 30, 2018 post “28 Peter Drucker Quotes to Energize Your Work Week,” here are 15 curated Drucker quotes (and the books you can find them in) on topics that are vital to all knowledge workers:
Achievement/Productivity
“Achievement is addictive.” – Management: Revised Edition, 2008
“The beacons of productivity and innovation must be our guideposts.” – The Ecological Vision, 1993
“Finally there is one continuing theme, from my earliest to my latest book: the freedom, the dignity, the status of the person in modern society, the role and function of organization as instrument of human achievement, human growth and human fulfillment, and the need of the individual for both, society and community.” – The Ecological Vision, 1993
“Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.” – Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1974
“To get at the new and better, you have to throw out the old, outworn, obsolete, no longer productive, as well as the mistakes, failure and misdirections of effort of the past.” – Managing for the Future, 1992
Teaching
“If you want to diagram my work, in the center is writing, then comes consulting, then comes teaching. I’ve never been primarily an academic. I like to teach because that’s the way I learn.” – Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, 2008
“In fact, finding the student’s strengths and focusing them on achievement is the best definition of the goal of teaching.” – Management: Revised Edition, 2008
“Just as no one learns as much about a subject as the person who is forced to teach it, no one develops as much as the person who is trying to help others to develop themselves.” – Management: Revised Edition, 2008
“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
“The most important way to develop people is to use them as teachers. Nobody learns as much as a good teacher.” – Managing the Non-Profit Organization, 1990
Time Management
“Learn to manage your time. The secret is not to do the five million things that do not need to be done and will never be missed.” – Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, 2008
“Recording time, managing time, consolidating time is the foundation of executive effectiveness.” – The Effective Executive, 1967
“The effective people I know simply discipline themselves to have enough time for thinking.” – Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, 2008
“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
“There are constant pressures toward unproductive and wasteful time-use.” – The Effective Executive, 1967
Many of the above quotes are applicable beyond the workplace. I hope they provide you with a sense of potential in reaching for excellence, meeting goals, and ongoing improvement.