"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. . ."