Tom Peters (1942) is best-known for In Search of Excellence. He has probably done more than anyone else to shift the debate on management from the confines of boardrooms, academia, and consultancies to a broader, worldwide audience.
Tom Peters
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Success follows from tryin’ enough stuff so that the odds of doin’ something right tilt your way. The only thing I’ve truly learned “for sure” in the last 40 years is “Try more stuff than the other guy” — there is no poetic license here, I mean it.
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Somebody asked Thomas Watson, Sr., the senior member of the Watson family that effectively founded IBM. They said, “Mr. Watson, how long does it take to become excellent?” And Mr. Watson purportedly said, “A minute.” This was years before The One Minute Manager. Somebody said, “A minute?” And he said, “Yes. It is a personal commitment to yourself that you will never again do anything that is not excellent.” And that’s what it’s about, one minute at a time. The motto of Alcoholics Anonymous, which they say has saved lives by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, is “How long does it take to stop drinking?” “A second. And then it’s life, one minute at a time.”
My Inconvenient Truth – part 1
The naivity of a beginner and the feedback of people around you are the best conditions for innovation to occur. As it turns out, innovation is more about allowing the innate creativity to come out than it is about being a genius. A few months ago I was a co-guest-speaker for a foundation of voluntary […]
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They say plan it. I say do it.
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Nobody—repeat, nobody—gets it right the first time.
Useful Insights from Employee Burnout
Research suggests that the level of autonomy or job-control determines the level of stress and burnout to a larger extent than job-demand or complexity. For managers there is a lesson in there: Respect.
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Unintended consequences outnumber intended consequences
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Implementation is the “last 99%”
Cracking the Code of Indifference…
… and Coming to Better Grips with Resistance For a few weeks now I am fascinated by a discussion on indifference on Tom Peters’ blog. It brought to my attention that there is more than ‘good old resistance’ to organizational change. The longer I thought about it the more I realized that the number one […]
The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management
The Best Things in Life are Free, Including Management Literature!
