Anyone know who originally said (in whatever form) "there is nothing so useless as doing well what should not be done at all"?

Lots of sites credit it (and minor variations) to Peter F. Drucker but a google reveals that he's a management consultant so he almost certainly stole it from somewhere else.

Anyone got an earlier source for it?

(To answer a question that came up in office conversation.)

quote:

Lots of sites credit it (and minor variations) to Peter F. Drucker but a google reveals that he's a management consultant so he almost certainly stole it from somewhere else.

Did your mother get a scare from a management consultant when you were in utero?

I've met some pretty sharp ones, and read others.

I don't think they called them management consultants that long ago. It also sounds like something I read by Oscar Wilde, but I can't remember what.

Peter Drucker was a very well-respected management guru, who worked for many major corporations and became a consultant in his later years. Throughout his long life (he lived to 96) he preached the gospel of efficient management and and foretold many of the developments in management thinking that have become cornerstones of modern management thinking.

He warned the US motor manufacturers, just after the second war, to beware Japan. GM's Alfred Sloan was so cross that he refused even to allow people mention Drucker's name in his presence. Toyota has now taken over from GM as the world's biggest motor manufacturer and has, for many years, been far more profitable than either GM or Ford - both of which organisations are now making losses that would have seemed inconceivable back in the 1940s.

So far as the quote is concerned, it certainly sounds like something that Drucker would have said, since he was great on management by objectives and said that the ultimate key to business success was that "...they knew what businesses they were in, what their competencies were, and how to keep their efforts focused on their goals...". So "doing well what needn't be done" would certainly not fit in with that concept.

Incidentally, if anyone finds Drucker's concept familiar, that might be because Peters and Waterman used it in their best-seller "In Search of Excellence", published some 30 years after Drucker came up with his own quote.