"Growth as a goal, to repeat, is delusion. William James, the American philosopher, talked of the "bitch goddess success." A philosopher of business today might well talk of the "bitch goddess growth.""

"Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management."

"The world political system is till based on the concept of the national sovereign state. For the first time therefore, in three hundred years economy and sovereignty are becoming divorced from each other."

"Financial "synergy" is a will-o'-the-wisp.It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice."

"There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable."

"Engineers speak half–jokingly about Murphy's Law: " If anything can go wrong, it will." But complexity stands under a second law as well. Let me call it Drucker's law: "If one thing goes wrong, everything else will, and at the same time.""

"Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is."

""Value added" is a meaningless concept for a retail business , for a bank, for a life insurance company, and for any other business which is not primarily engaged in manufacturing."

"There is a point at which a transformation has to take place."

"Top management as a function and as a structure was first developed by Georg von Siemens (1839-1901) in Germany between 1870 and 1880, when he designed and built the Deutsche Bank and made it, within a very few years, into continental Europe's leading and most dynamic financial institution."

"The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything."

"One reason for the tremendous increase in health-care costs in the U.S. is managerial neglect of the "hotel services" by the people who dominate the hospital, such as doctors and nurses."

"The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago."

"The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool."

"Communication is always "propaganda." The emitter always wants "to get something across.""

"One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done."

"Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions."

"The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things."

"A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example."

"To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order."

"The worker's effectiveness is determined largely by the way he is being managed."

"We do not need more laws. No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model."

"The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it."

"Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity that causes it, this is therefore the best-indeed the only truly good-solution."

"And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much."

"It has been said, and only half in jest, that a tough, professionally led union is a great force for improving management performance. It forces the manager to think about what he is doing and to be able to explain his actions and behavior."

"[[Management] has authority only as long as it performs."

"The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society."

"An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance... Any attempt to go beyond that is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no "loyalty," he owes no "love" and no "attitudes"--he owes performance and nothing else. .... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform."

"A tool is not necessarily better because it is bigger. A tool is best if it does the job required with a minimum of effort, with a minimum of complexity, and with a minimum of power."

"When Henry Ford said, "The customer can have a car in any color as long as it's black," he was not joking."

"The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive."

""Loafing" is easy, but "leisure" is difficult."

"As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it."

"Frederick W. Taylor was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study. On Taylor's 'scientific management' rests, above all, the tremendous surge of affluence in the last seventy-five years which has lifted the working masses in the developed countries well above any level recorded before, even for the well-to-do. Taylor, though the Isaac Newton (or perhaps the Archimedes) of the science of work, laid only first foundations, however. Not much has been added to them since – even though he has been dead all of sixty years."

"One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it."

"A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure."

"The fault is in the system and not in the men."

"Decisions exist only in the present."

"It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all."

"The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives."

"Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it."

"Profit is not a cause but a result-"

"The prevailing economic theory of business enterprise and behavior, the maximization of profit—which is simply a complicated way of phrasing the old saw of buying cheap and selling dear—may adequately explain how Richard Sears operated. But it cannot explain how Sears, Roebuck or any other business enterprise operates, nor how it should operate. The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless."

"The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different."

"A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future."

"A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive."

"We will have to learn to lead people rather then to contain them."

"Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution."