Drucker wrote it in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, the 1973 book the Drucker Institute calls his magnum opus ↗. Wikiquote’s sourced section and LibQuotes independently place the sentence at page 455. A reworded form — “ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things” — now circulates more widely; AZQuotes credits that wording to the Routledge abridged and revised Management, p. 361, which we could not confirm against a copy.
“The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things” Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 455.
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Provenance
Where it actually appears
Work
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
Published
New York: Harper & Row, 1973 — library catalogues often date the printing 1974
Location
Part 2, chapter 36, p. 455
Later wording
“ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things” — cited by AZQuotes to the Routledge abridged and revised Management, p. 361 (not independently confirmed)
The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.
Part 2, p. 455
Quoted here as the 1973 text records it. Wikiquote’s sourced section and LibQuotes both place the sentence at page 455; LibQuotes adds that it falls in chapter 36 of Part 2. The Internet Archive’s scan of the book is lending-restricted, so page 455 could not be read directly for this entry.
Wikiquote’s sourced section ↗ lists the sentence verbatim under “MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 2” at p. 455, citing the New York: Harper & Row edition.
LibQuotes ↗ gives the same page independently, as “Chapter 36, pg.455 — MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973) — Part 2.”
The line comes from a book first published in 1973, so it is firmly under United States copyright — works first published in 1931 or later generally have not entered the public domain by age. Quoting one sentence with a full citation is ordinary attribution; the book itself is not free to reproduce, which is why the Internet Archive’s scan is lending-restricted.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Right author, drifting words
Nobody else is claiming this one — the attribution to Drucker holds up. What travels badly is the wording, and where people say it came from.
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Wording“ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things” Later edition
This is a reworded version of the same sentence, and it is now the more widely circulated one. AZQuotes serves it under Drucker’s name with the citation “Management”, p. 361, Routledge ↗ — that is the Routledge abridged and revised Management, not the 1973 book — and with a typo, “ordinary humans beings,” that has been copied onwards. We could not check p. 361 against a copy, so treat the edition as AZQuotes’ claim rather than an established one; what is certain is that the 1973 text reads “common men.”
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Wording“making common men do uncommon things” Paraphrase
A compressed form circulates in business commentary. Steve Denning’s Forbes essay writes that Drucker “defined the purpose of an organization as ‘making common men do uncommon things’” ↗ — and files it, along with the other Drucker lines around it, under The Practice of Management (1954). That is the wrong book: the sentence is on p. 455 of the 1973 Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, and no page is given.
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SourceThe Daily DruckerAnthology, not origin
Because the line was reprinted in Drucker’s daily-reading anthology, many pages cite the anthology as the source — one such write-up ↗ quotes the sentence and credits The Daily Drucker. The anthology reprints it; the 1973 book is where it first appears.
✓The sentence is Drucker’s own and it has a page number: Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 455 — as recorded in Wikiquote’s sourced list ↗.
Context
Why Drucker said it
Drucker was not paying anyone a compliment. His point was arithmetic: once an organisation grows past a handful of people it gets an ordinary spread of talent, so no institution can be run on the assumption that it has hired geniuses. What separates a good organisation from a bad one, in his telling, is whether it can get uncommon results out of the perfectly ordinary people it actually has — by putting them where their strengths work and making their weaknesses irrelevant.
That is why the line sits where it does in the book. It opens Drucker’s argument about what he called the spirit of performance: morale measured by results rather than by everyone getting along, and a focus on what people can do rather than what they cannot.
The claim is not that people are secretly extraordinary. It is that the organisation is the variable.
Why later editions read differently
The 1973 sentence is written in the idiom of its decade — “common men.” The version most quote sites now serve reads “ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things,” usually still tagged with the older date. The one citation anyone attaches to it is AZQuotes’, which points at “Management”, p. 361, Routledge ↗ — the abridged and revised Management, complete with a stray typo, “ordinary humans beings.” We could not confirm that page, so the rewording is best described as widely recirculated rather than pinned to a documented edition change.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1909–2005 · Austrian-born American management writer & consultant
Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born in Vienna in 1909, fled Europe as the Nazis rose, and spent six decades in America turning management into something you could actually study. BusinessWeek called him “the man who invented management”, and his 1973 doorstop Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices became the reference book a generation of executives, nonprofit directors and civil servants kept on the desk. He died in Claremont, California, in 2005, eight days short of his ninety-sixth birthday.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 455.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-purpose-of-an-organization-is-to-enable-common-men-to/