Tom Peters (b.1942,) fully Thomas J. Peters, is a celebrated American business management consultant. A bestselling author on management practices and problem-solving methodologies, he is widely credited with launching the management guru industry.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Peters earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from Cornell University. After serving in the U.S. Navy 1966–70, he continued his education at Stanford University, graduating with an MBA in 1972 and a doctorate in business in 1977. Peters worked at the management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co. 1974–81 and then formed his independent management consulting company, the Tom Peters Group.
Peters gained fame after the publication of his original business blockbuster In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-run Companies (1982; with Robert H. Waterman, Jr.) In 2001, Peters admitted to fabricating some of its underlying data.
After In Search of Excellence spent 130 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, Peters became one of the most sought after speakers in the corporate world. He continues to command high fees for doling out “big ideas” through charismatic on-stage performances replete with exclamations, quotations, and footnotes.
Peters’s other popular books include Passion for Excellence (1985,) Thriving on Chaos (1987,) Liberation Management (1992,) Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age (2003,) The Little Big Things (2010,) and The Excellence Dividend (2018.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Tom Peters
Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Action, Success
If your company has a clean-desk policy, the company is nuts and you’re nuts to stay there.
—Tom Peters
If not excellence, what? If not excellence now, when?
—Tom Peters
The most important and visible outcropping of the action bias in excellent companies is their willingness to try things out, to experiment. If you wait until you believe you are safe, sure to be without occasional foolish feelings, you’ve most likely waited too long.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Feelings, Believe, Act, Action, Try
The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Ideas
Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence—only in constant improvement and constant change.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Excellence
Train everyone lavishly, you can’t overspend on training.
—Tom Peters
Mistakes are not just the spice of life. Mistakes are life. Mistakes are not to be tolerated. They are to be encouraged.
—Tom Peters
The best leaders… almost without exception and at every level, are master users of stories and symbols.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Leadership, Leaders
The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Business
Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time … but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Reading, Books
We found that the most exciting environments, that treated people very well, are also tough as nails. There is no bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo… excellent companies provide two things simultaneously: tough environments and very supportive environments.
—Tom Peters
Good managers have a bias for action.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Management
Winners must learn to relish change with the same enthusiasm and energy that we have resisted it in the past.
—Tom Peters
Listening may or may not be an “act of love” or way to “tap into
people’s dreams,” but it sure as hell is (1) an uncommon act of
courtesy and recognition of worth from which (2) you will invariably
learn amazing stuff … and (3) it will build-maintain relationships
beyond your wildest dreams.
—Tom Peters
All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Customers, Leaders, Leadership
The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.
—Tom Peters
Do it, fix it, try it.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Try, Excellence
If you really want to kill morale, have layoffs every two months for the next two years.
—Tom Peters
Celebrate what you want to see more of.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Celebration, Imagination
If a window of opportunity appears, don’t pull down the shade.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Opportunity
Give a lot, expect a lot, and if you don’t get it, prune.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Giving, Charity
Self-presentation is worthy of extreme obsessive study.
—Tom Peters
I don’t want an epitaph on my gravestone that says, ‘He would have pursued some big dreams in his life, but other people wouldn’t let him.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Dreams, Life, Dream, People
Communication is everyone’s panacea for everything.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Communication
Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Leadership
Professional success requires more than talent. Among other things, it requires drive, initiative, commitment, involvement, and—above all—enthusiasm.
—Tom Peters
Do something … in the next half hour! Don’t let yourself get stuck!
There is … ALWAYS … something little you can start/do in the next
thirty minutes to make a wee, concrete step forward with a
problem-opportunity.
—Tom Peters
It’s up to each of us alone to figure out who we are, who we are not, and to act more or less consistently with those conclusions.
—Tom Peters
Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.
—Tom Peters
Topics: Leaders, Leadership
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