"So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work."

"A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge."

"My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions."

"The purpose of a business is to create a customer."

"Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans."

"Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations... They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.'"

"The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said."

"Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer."

"Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got."

"Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement."

"Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs."

"Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility."

"Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the "naturals," the ones who somehow know how to teach."

"Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake."

"The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer."

"Business, that's easily defined - it's other people's money."

"Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done."

"Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed."

"Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level."

"People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year."

"The computer is a moron."

"The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications."

"The growth for education and training will be in continuing adult education. Online delivery is the trigger for this growth, but the demand for lifetime education stems from profound changes in society. We live in an economy where knowledge, not buildings and machinery, is the chief resource and where knowledge-workers make up the biggest part of the work force."

"Education can no longer be the sole property of the state."

"Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision"

"A business exists to create a customer"

"There is only one ethics, one set of rules of morality, one code: That of individual behavior in which the same rules apply to everyone alike."

"The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said."

"The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done."

"Leaders shouldn't attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can't compromise."

"Concentration is the key to economic results. No other principles of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration."

"Decision making is the specific executive task."

"Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past"

"Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future."

"How can we overcome the resistance to innovation that plagues most organizations?"

"INNOVATION is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation."

"Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality."

"We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it."

"The better a man is the more mistakes he will make for the more things he will try."

"There are no creeds in mathematics."

"My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions"

"One cannot buy, rent or hire more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it. Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time. All work takes place in, and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource."

"Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time."

"Until we can manage TIME, we can manage nothing else."

"There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job."

"The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done."

"The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem."

"Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen."

"Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folklore and superstition, and of cooperation for force. . ."

"Clasps his laps around minas throat, pieces her skin and drinks her blood. He then forces her into an act that binds her to the vampire for eternity"