Top 100 Tom Peters Quotes
#1. Excellence comes from human beings doing things of value that customers find memorable.
Tom Peters
#2. If I read a book that cost me $20 and I get one good idea, I've gotten one of the greatest bargains of all time.
Tom Peters
#3. Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.
Tom Peters
#5. A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.
Tom Peters
#6. Leaders win through logistics. Vision, sure. Strategy, yes. But when you go to war, you need to have both toilet paper and bullets at the right place at the right time. In other words, you must win through superior logistics.
Tom Peters
#7. Mastery is great, but even that is not enough. You have to be able to change course without a bead of sweat, or remorse.
Tom Peters
#9. Winners must learn to relish change with the same enthusiasm and energy that we have resisted it in the past.
Tom Peters
#10. And remember: Everything in business is a paradox. To be excellent, you have to be consistent. When you're consistent, you're vulnerable to attack. Yes, it's a paradox. Now deal with it!
Tom Peters
#11. As a consumer, you want to associate with brands whose powerful presence creates a halo effect that rubs off on you.
Tom Peters
#12. All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.
Tom Peters
#13. Inspiring visions rarely (I'm tempted to say never) include numbers.
Tom Peters
#14. Skill at creating, exploiting, and exiting crucial alliances beats ownership of fixed assets
Tom Peters
#15. The best kept secret in the global economy today is this: When your service is AWESOME you get so stinking rich you have to buy new bags to carry all the money home.
Tom Peters
#16. When you choose a managerial path, you are choosing to devote your life to people. Period.
Tom Peters
#17. The selfish leader will attempt to lead others for their own gain and for the detriment of others.
Tom Peters
#19. Don't let the vision be shot through with holes, but be damn sure some of your best and brightest are shooting at it
with bazookas as well as sniper's rifles.
Tom Peters
#20. A passive approach to professional growth will leave you by the wayside.
Tom Peters
#21. If no one is pissed-off with you then you are dead but just haven't figured it out yet.
Tom Peters
#22. Confidence means non-paralysis, a willingness to act, and act decisively, to start new things and cut failing ventures off.
Tom Peters
#23. You can't think your way out of a box; you've got to act.
Tom Peters
#24. Ready, fire, aim. Do it! Make it happen! Action counts. No one ever sat their way to success.
Tom Peters
#25. Entrepreneurs have no memories. They take on the world with a completely fresh view.
Tom Peters
#26. One size NEVER fits all. One size fits one. Period
Tom Peters
#27. You can't live life without an eraser.
Tom Peters
#28. An ability to embrace new ideas, routinely challenge old ones, and live with paradox will be the effective leader's premier trait.
Tom Peters
#29. Don't 'tolerate' mistakes. Embrace them!
Tom Peters
#30. I believe in the age of the Internet, Facebook and Twitter, that relationships are everything.
Tom Peters
#31. Rewards should go to teams as a whole.
Tom Peters
#33. Treat the customer as an appreciating asset.
Tom Peters
#34. I don't read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.
Tom Peters
#35. Organizations exist to serve. Period. Leaders live to serve. Period.
Tom Peters
#36. Change is not so much about being the first one to embrace a new idea, but being the first to forget an old one
Tom Peters
#37. Smile if it kills you. The physiology of smiling diffuses a lot of anger and angst. It makes your body and soul feel better.
Tom Peters
#38. Success requires a persistent misreading of the odds.
Tom Peters
#39. Companies have got to learn to eat change for breakfast.
Tom Peters
#40. Appreciation, applause, approval, respect - we all love it!
Tom Peters
#41. What you decide not to do is probably more important that what you decide to do.
Tom Peters
#42. WORK ON YOUR STORY! He/she who has the best story wins! In life! In business! The White House!
Tom Peters
#43. Don't settle for less than is possible.
Tom Peters
#44. The hyperfast-moving, wired-up, reengineered, quality-obsessed organization will succeed or fail on the strength of the trust that its managers place in the folks working on the front line.
Tom Peters
#45. If you love your company and love what you do, you will serve your customers better-period!
Tom Peters
#46. Formula for success: under promise and over deliver.
Tom Peters
#47. If there is a single tragic flaw that mars our biggest enterprises, it is conservatism - the failure to fail, and fail big, in an era of unprecedented volatility and ambiguity.
Tom Peters
#49. Your calendar never lies. All we have is our time. The way we spend our
time is our priorities, is our strategy. Your calendar knows what you
really care about. Do you?
Tom Peters
#50. To sell is above all to master the art and science of listening.
Tom Peters
#51. If the other guy is getting better, then you'd better be getting better faster than the other guy is getting better ... or you're getting worse.
Tom Peters
#52. The best leaders are the best notetakers, best askers, and best learners.
Tom Peters
#53. I don't believe in holy writ. Buy fifty books or twenty-five books, take three weeks off, read them and make up your own theory. The fact that you end up literally burning twenty-two out of twenty-five books is beside the point.
Tom Peters
#54. 'In Search of Excellence' was an afterthought, the runt of the McKinsey consulting litter, a hip-pocket project that was never supposed to amount to much.
Tom Peters
#55. Dot the i's, cross the t's, answer the phones promptly, send out errorless invoices, and in general never forget that the devil is in the details.
Tom Peters
#56. I think it's wonderful to save the world, but you need to be part of the world, too.
Tom Peters
#58. Train everyone lavishly. You can't overspend on training.
Tom Peters
#59. How do you achieve excellence? ... Stop doing non-excellent stuff!
Tom Peters
#60. Design is so critical it should be on the agenda of every meeting in every single department.
Tom Peters
#61. If you're a leader, your whole reason for living is to help human beings develop - to really develop people and make work a place that's energetic and exciting and a growth opportunity, whether you're running a Housekeeping Department or Google. I mean, this is not rocket science.
Tom Peters
#62. Effective listening is a professional achievement-achieved only through hard work.
Tom Peters
#63. Advantage comes not from the spectacular or the technical. Advantage comes from a persistent seeking of the mundane edge.
Tom Peters
#64. Business book writing for me is when some set of ideas gets stuck in my mind, I write a book about it. I haven't got a theory and I haven't got a framework.
Tom Peters
#65. Passion. The life of an entrepreneur is occasionally exhilarating, and almost always exhausting. Only unbridled passion for the concept is likely to see you through the 17-hour days (month after month) and the painful mistakes that are part and parcel of the start-up process.
Tom Peters
#66. Become a "learning organization". Shuck your arrogance - "if it isn't our idea, it can't be that good" - and become a determined copycat/ adapter/ enhancer.
Tom Peters
#67. In McKinsey's world, all of life is one of two things: strategy or organization.
Tom Peters
#68. A little (or more) boat burning would do many enterprises a world of good.
Tom Peters
#69. The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.
Tom Peters
#70. Something mysterious happens to a curious, fully engaged mind - and it happens as often as not, subconsciously. Strange little sparks are set off, connections made, insights triggered
Tom Peters
#71. Effective visions are lived in details, not broad strokes.
Tom Peters
#72. Transforming leadership, [is defined as] leadership that builds on man's need for meaning, leadership that creates institutional purpose ... he is the value-shaper, the exemplar, the maker of meanings ... he is the true artist, the true pathfinder.
Tom Peters
#73. Today brands are everything, and all kinds of products and services - from accounting firms to sneaker makers to restaurants - are figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded by a Tommy Hilfiger-like buzz.
Tom Peters
#74. How do you humiliate and demean someone and then expect him or her to care about product quality.
Tom Peters
#75. Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.
Tom Peters
#76. Are you placing enough interesting, freakish, long shot, weirdo bets?
Tom Peters
#78. Stop being conned by the old mantra that says, 'Leaders are cool, managers are dweebs.' Instead, follow the Peters Principle: Leaders are cool. Managers are cool too!
Tom Peters
#79. Leadership is about tapping the wellsprings of human motivation - and about fundamental relations with one's fellows.
Tom Peters
#80. Only those who constantly retool themselves stand a chance of staying employed in the years ahead.
Tom Peters
#81. Who, precisely, are your Dreamers? Are their Dreams in Technicolor? Do you allow their most Outrageous Dreams to be seen in public?
Tom Peters
#82. What is my personal strategy for the next 10 hours? Who can I talk with or what can I volunteer for to learn something new?
Tom Peters
#83. The difference between great and average is, mostly, having the imagination and zeal to re-create yourself daily.
Tom Peters
#84. Good managers have a bias for action.
Tom Peters
#85. Forget loyalty. Or at least loyalty to one's corporation. Try loyalty to your Rolodex-your network-instead.
Tom Peters
#86. As project chief you are creating a narrative, a story, a good yarn. If you look at the process-journey that way, you and your gang will ... dramatically up the odds of a WOW outcome!
Tom Peters
#87. One percent improvement in 1,000 things is better than 1,000% improvement in one thing.
Tom Peters
#88. Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.
Tom Peters
#89. It's relatively simple. If we're not getting more, better, faster than they are getting more, better, faster, then we're getting less, no better or more worse.
Tom Peters
#90. If you really want to kill morale, have layoffs every two months for the next two years.
Tom Peters
#91. Progress is mostly the product of rogues.
Tom Peters
#92. Anybody who is an entrepreneur is a person who essentially has impaired judgment. The odds of success are zilch.
Tom Peters
#93. In today's economy there are no experts, no 'best and brightest' with all the answers. It's up to each one of us. The only way to screw up is to not try anything.
Tom Peters
#94. Excellence is not an aspiration. Excellence is what you do in the next five minutes.
Tom Peters
#95. The company's most urgent task is to learn to welcome, beg for, demand - innovation from everyone.
Tom Peters
#96. You have to stand out if you want to move up.
Tom Peters
#97. Musing on the phrase 'waste of time.' So much more complex than it appears. Many 'wastes of time' small talk, daydreaming are imperatives.
Tom Peters
#98. I urge you to set a tough, quantitative target for adding "differentiators" as I call them, to every service you provide.
Tom Peters
#99. TRUST, not technology, is the issue of the decade.
Tom Peters
#100. Fail faster. Succeed sooner." - David Kelley, founder IDEO
Tom Peters
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