Gems of Wisdom from Peter F. Drucker

I came across this publication about some great ideas of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management, at a convenience store today.  Atttracted by the title, I bought it and have read more than half of it.

The title of a chapter totally contradicts the common assertion that one should work hard to make up for a lack of natural talent.  It says:

「勤能補拙」？ 可能導致你忘了自身長處

This idea is further complemented by the subtitle:

杜拉克認為，「自己會什麼」比「自己不會什麼」來得重要…避免自己長期將資源和時間浪費在枝微末節上。

In the chapter, the editor quoted Drucker’s words:

「不要盲目追趕自己沒有的能力，應該充分發揮自己的強項創造最大的效果。」

Isn't this a mindset that parents and educators should adopt?  In fact, everyone needs to be reminded of it.

Having never read any book by Drucker, I surfed online for some gems of wisdom from him.  The following are some:

About Learning

"We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn."

"Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes."

About Doing:

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

"Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work."

“Doing the right thing is more important than  doing the thing  right."

"Quality means doing it right when no one is looking."

"Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable."

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

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

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a  courageous decision.”

About Leadership:

"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 crdit....This is what creats trust, what enables you to get the task done."

About Others:

Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.”

"The best way to predict the future is to create it."