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Who really said it

There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer

Written by Peter Drucker 1909–2005 · Austrian-American management writer & consultant
Verified In copyright

Drucker wrote it in The Practice of Management (New York: Harper, 1954), in the chapter “What is a business?” — Wikiquote cites it to p. 37 under its The Practice of Management (1954) heading, on a citation line that names both the Harper 1st ed. (1954) and the Routledge 2012 reprint, and Google Books full-text search returns the sentence inside its full paragraph in Drucker reprint volumes. One caveat worth knowing: his own text reads “definition of business purpose,” without the “a” the popular form inserts.

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer” Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: Harper, 1954), 37 — "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer." Verified via Quotle.info.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Peter F. Drucker and HarperCollins Publishers). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

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Provenance

The source

Work
The Practice of Management
Published
New York: Harper, 1954
Chapter
“What is a business?”
Located at
p. 37, per Wikiquote’s sourced entry, on a citation line covering both the Harper 1st ed. (1954) and the Routledge 2012 reprint

Its purpose must lie outside of the business itself. In fact, it must lie in society since business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. Markets are not created by God, nature, or economic forces but by businessmen.

Transcribed from a Google Books full-text snippet of a Drucker reprint volume, which returns these four sentences as one continuous passage. The 1954 Harper printing is still in copyright and its Internet Archive scan is lending-restricted, so the original page cannot be reproduced here.

Internet Archive: The Practice of Management (1954)

How we got here

  • Wikiquote lists the line with a page number under its heading The Practice of Management (1954). The single citation line beneath that heading covers two printings — “Harper, 1st ed. 1954 ; Routledge, 2012” — and the “p. 37” sits under the quote itself, so Wikiquote does not pin the page to one printing or the other — Wikiquote ↗.
  • The Internet Archive’s catalog record confirms the book: Peter F. Drucker, The practice of management, 1954, 416 pages, with a contents list that includes the chapter “What is a business?” That record catalogues the imprint as “New York: Harper & Row” — a house that did not exist until 1962, when Harper & Brothers merged with Row, Peterson & Co., so the 1954 first edition was Harper & Brothers — Internet Archive ↗.
  • Google Books full-text search returns the sentence in its paragraph, and settles the wording: Drucker writes “definition of business purpose,” with no article — Google Books ↗. A 2003 marketing text carries the passage on to its next move, “It is the customer who determines what a business is” — Google Books ↗.
  • Quote Investigator has no file on this line: a site search for “create a customer” returns nothing, and its Drucker articles cover other quotes — Quote Investigator ↗. There is no origin dispute here to adjudicate.
In copyright

The Practice of Management was first published in 1954 — well after the 1931 line for United States public domain — so the book and this sentence remain in copyright. Drucker’s work is still actively published by HarperCollins, which issued The Peter Drucker Collection on Managing in Turbulent Times in 2014. The short excerpt above is reproduced here for identification and comment only.

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

What actually goes wrong with this one

Nobody is stealing this line from Drucker. It is his, it is properly sourced, and no rival claimant exists. What drifts is the wording — and the book it gets pinned to.

The extra “a” one word off

The form that circulates — and the form Wikiquote transcribes — reads “definition of a business purpose.” Drucker’s own text carries no article. A Google Books full-text search of a Drucker reprint volume returns “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer” inside its full paragraph, while the same search of that volume for the “a” form returns nothing at all — Google Books ↗.

Drucker’s later books right author, late citation

Drucker reused the sentence for decades, so citations scatter across his shelf. A full-text search of Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices returns it too — Google Books ↗. A citation to one of those later titles is late rather than wrong; the sentence’s first home is the 1954 book.

Right author, right book, one word off: Drucker wrote “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer” in The Practice of Management (Harper, 1954), cited to p. 37 by Wikiquote’s sourced entry ↗, on a citation line covering both the Harper 1st ed. and the Routledge 2012 reprint.

Context

Why the sentence mattered

The line arrives in the middle of a deliberately awkward argument. Drucker refuses to let a business define itself by what it makes or by what it earns, because — in the sentences immediately before it — “its purpose must lie outside of the business itself. In fact, it must lie in society since business enterprise is an organ of society.” Having pushed the definition all the way out into society, he then narrows it in one clause to a single person: the customer.

That inversion is why the line outlasted its decade. Wikipedia summarises Drucker’s position as holding that a company’s primary responsibility is to serve its customers, and that profit is not the primary goal but an essential condition of the company’s continued existence — Wikipedia ↗. The same article notes that The Practice of Management was later voted the third most influential management book of the twentieth century in a poll of the Fellows of the Academy of Management.

Markets are not created by God, nature, or economic forces but by businessmen.

Why we can’t show you the page

The Internet Archive holds a scan of the 1954 Harper edition, but the book is still in copyright and the scan is lending-restricted, so its full text cannot be read or quoted from directly. The passage reproduced here comes from Google Books full-text search of later Drucker reprint volumes, which return the sentence together with the sentences on either side of it — enough to confirm both the wording and its context.

Quote Investigator has not published a file on this quote. A search of the site for “create a customer” returns nothing, and its ten Drucker articles cover other lines entirely. That absence is itself informative: QI investigates quotes whose origin is contested, and this one’s is not.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Purpose Leadership

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote — Peter Druckeren.wikiquote.org

Lists the quote in its sourced section under the heading The Practice of Management (1954), citing Harper, 1st ed., p. 37.
Internet Archive — The Practice of Management (1954)archive.org

Catalog record for the 1954 edition, 416 pages, with a contents list that includes the chapter “What is a business?” The record catalogues the imprint as Harper & Row, a house not formed until 1962.
Google Books — the passage in its paragraphbooks.google.com

Full-text search of a Drucker reprint volume returns the sentence with the lines before and after it, wording it “definition of business purpose” — no article.
Google Books — quoted in Total Integrated Marketingbooks.google.com

Hulbert, Capon and Piercy (Kogan Page, 2003) quote the passage on through to “It is the customer who determines what a business is.”
Drucker Institute — About Peter Druckerwww.drucker.institute

Biography from the institute at Claremont: birth and death dates, career, and the standing of the 1954 book.
Quote Investigator — Drucker filesquoteinvestigator.com

QI’s ten Drucker investigations; none covers this line, and a site search for “create a customer” returns nothing.

The author

The man who put the customer outside the building

Peter Drucker

1909–2005 · Austrian-American writer, teacher & consultant

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born in Vienna on 19 November 1909, took a doctorate in international law at Frankfurt in 1932, emigrated to the United States in 1937, and taught at NYU from 1950 to 1971 and at Claremont Graduate University from 1971 to 2002. He died on 11 November 2005, aged 95. The Practice of Management, published in 1954, is widely considered the first book to organize the art and science of running an organization into an integrated body of knowledge — Drucker himself said it laid “the foundations of a discipline.”

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Chicago

Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: Harper, 1954), 37. [Page number as cited by Wikiquote, on a citation line that covers both the Harper first edition and the Routledge 2012 reprint; we have not confirmed the pagination against a first-edition copy.]

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/there-is-only-one-valid-definition-of-a-business-purpose-to/

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