Top 100 Tom Peters Quotes
#2. Instead of courage' management guru Tom Peters recommends fostering 'a level of fury with the status quo such that one cannot not act.
Adam M. Grant
#3. I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote 'Search.' There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove.
Tom Peters
#4. The workplace revolution that transformed the lives of blue-collar workers in the 1970s and 1980s is finally reaching the offices and cubicles of the white-collar workers.
Tom Peters
#5. Mistakes are life. Mistakes are not to be tolerated ... they are to be encouraged. The bigger the better.
Tom Peters
#6. Excellence comes from human beings doing things of value that customers find memorable.
Tom Peters
#7. Every managerial act must be seen as an unequivocal support for urgency in pursuit of constant testing, change, and improvement.
Tom Peters
#8. You will be remembered, in the long haul, for the quality of your work, not the quantity of your work. No one evaluates Picasso based on the number of paintings he churned out.
Tom Peters
#9. The unthinkable is thinkable. No: likely.
Tom Peters
#10. The "Excellence Standard" is not about Grand Outcomes. In Zenlike terms, all we have is today. If the day's work cannot be assessed as Excellent, then the oceanic overall goal of Excellence has not been advanced. Period.
Tom Peters
#11. 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
#12. One of the biggest problems of 'In Search of Excellence' is that it focused on giant, publicly-traded companies. There are thousands upon thousands of excellent companies. Some of them are two-person accountancies in a community of three thousand people.
Tom Peters
#13. Only pissed-off people change the world.
Tom Peters
#14. 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
#16. The thing that keeps a business ahead of the competition is excellence in execution.
Tom Peters
#17. A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand.
Tom Peters
#18. He who makes the quickest, coolest prototypes reigns!
Tom Peters
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Never, ever rest on your laurels. Today's laurels are tomorrow's compost.
Tom Peters
#22. Customers perceive service in their own unique, idiosyncratic, emotional, irrational, end-of-the-day, and totally human terms. Perception is all there is!
Tom Peters
#23. Statistically and emotionally, I believe that the way I can be of help to society is by doing what I know and what I've been good at.
Tom Peters
#24. OPPORTUNITY is not "knocking." It is pounding on your door.
Tom Peters
#25. Who comes first? Don't be silly, says King Hal; it's employees. That is - and this dear Watson, is elementary - if you genuinely want to put customers first, you must put employees more first.
Tom Peters
#26. 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
#28. There are few things that will take you further in life, than your ability to make a good presentation.
Tom Peters
#29. Winners must learn to relish change with the same enthusiasm and energy that we have resisted it in the past.
Tom Peters
#30. 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
#31. Vision is dandy, but sustainable company excellence comes from a huge stable of able managers.
Tom Peters
#32. Develop a respect and reverence for the principle of variation: the idea that the message ain't in the mean, the mode or the median - it's in the differences that occur throughout a population.
Tom Peters
#33. I don't want the 35-year-olds in my audience to think of me as as 'pops' giving the kind of advice that only 65-year-olds can understand.
Tom Peters
#34. I'm fundamentally not interested in the Fortune 500 companies - in US, Mexico, anywhere. The real backbones of economic growth are small and medium businesses.
Tom Peters
#35. As a consumer, you want to associate with brands whose powerful presence creates a halo effect that rubs off on you.
Tom Peters
#36. 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
#37. We are no doubt in the Great Age of the Brand.
Tom Peters
#38. All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.
Tom Peters
#39. It doesn't matter what product or service you're offering; there is unlimited ability to improve the quality of anything.
Tom Peters
#40. Inspiring visions rarely (I'm tempted to say never) include numbers.
Tom Peters
#41. Skill at creating, exploiting, and exiting crucial alliances beats ownership of fixed assets
Tom Peters
#42. 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
#43. When you choose a managerial path, you are choosing to devote your life to people. Period.
Tom Peters
#44. The drive for control, or the perception thereof, is truly the strongest force in human nature.
Tom Peters
#45. The selfish leader will attempt to lead others for their own gain and for the detriment of others.
Tom Peters
#46. Creating in all employees the awareness that their best efforts are essential and that they will share in the rewards of the company's success.
Tom Peters
#47. Want to accomplish something, any-damn-thing? Sharpen your political skills!
Tom Peters
#49. My problem is not that I see all 17 sides of any issue, but I'm equally passionate about all 17 sides simultaneously.
Tom Peters
#50. 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
#51. A passive approach to professional growth will leave you by the wayside.
Tom Peters
#52. If no one is pissed-off with you then you are dead but just haven't figured it out yet.
Tom Peters
#53. Excellent firms don't believe in excellence - only in constant improvement and constant change.
Tom Peters
#54. Confidence means non-paralysis, a willingness to act, and act decisively, to start new things and cut failing ventures off.
Tom Peters
#55. The winners stun us not by their cleverness, but by the fact that every tiny aspect of the business is just a touch better than the norm.
Tom Peters
#56. Momentum is a fragile force. Its worst enemy: procrastination. Its best friend: a deadline (think Election Day). Implication no. 1 (and there is no no. 2): Get to work! NOW!
Tom Peters
#57. Quality involves living the message of the possibility of perfection and infinite improvement, living it day in and day out, decade by decade.
Tom Peters
#58. You can't think your way out of a box; you've got to act.
Tom Peters
#59. The new idea either finds a champion or it dies. No ordinary involvement with a new idea provides the energy required to cope with the indifference and resistance that change provokes.
Tom Peters
#60. Nearly 100% of innovation-from business to politics-is inspired not by "market analysis" but by people who are supremely pissed off by the way things are.
Tom Peters
#61. Listen while you can, so that you can lead when you must.
Tom Peters
#62. There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity
Tom Peters
#63. Ready, fire, aim. Do it! Make it happen! Action counts. No one ever sat their way to success.
Tom Peters
#64. Entrepreneurs have no memories. They take on the world with a completely fresh view.
Tom Peters
#65. You are who you go to lunch with! Break bread with cool and you will become more cool. Conversely: break bread with dull and well, you can figure it out.
Tom Peters
#66. One size NEVER fits all. One size fits one. Period
Tom Peters
#67. It's not enough to be close to the customer. You've got to be glued to the customer.
Tom Peters
#68. You can't live life without an eraser.
Tom Peters
#69. An ability to embrace new ideas, routinely challenge old ones, and live with paradox will be the effective leader's premier trait.
Tom Peters
#70. Leaders understand the ultimate power of relationships.
Tom Peters
#71. The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.
Tom Peters
#72. Don't 'tolerate' mistakes. Embrace them!
Tom Peters
#73. I believe in the age of the Internet, Facebook and Twitter, that relationships are everything.
Tom Peters
#74. If the person you delegated to does the job twice as well as you would have done it, consider yourself a leader.
Tom Peters
#75. Rewards should go to teams as a whole.
Tom Peters
#76. Integrity may be about little things as much or more than big ones.
Tom Peters
#78. Treat the customer as an appreciating asset.
Tom Peters
#79. Organize as much as possible around teams, to achieve enhanced focus, task orientation, innovativeness, and individual commitment.
Tom Peters
#80. Divas do it, golfers do it, pilots do it, violists do it, sprinters do it, soldiers do it, surgeons do it, astronauts do it ... only business people think it isn't necessary to train.
Tom Peters
#81. Winston Churchill said that appetite was the most important thing about education. Leadership guru Warren Bennis says he wants to be remembered as 'curious to the end.' David Ogilvy contends that the greatest ad copywriters are marked by an insatiable curiosity 'about every subject under the sun.'
Tom Peters
#82. I think economics is about passion. Economic progress, whether it is a two-person coffee shop or whether it is Netscape, is about people with brave ideas. Because it is brave to mortgage the house, when you've got two kids, to start a coffee shop.
Tom Peters
#83. 'In Search of Excellence' - even the title - is a reminder that business isn't dry, dreary, boring, or by the numbers. Life at work can be cool - and work that's cool isn't confined to Tiger Woods, Yo-Yo Ma, or Tom Hanks. It's available to all of us and any of us.
Tom Peters
#84. I think my manager of 30-some odd years now, Tom Hammond. He's as fine a person as you could ever meet. And he's had great theatrical taste and has influenced me that way.
Bernadette Peters
#85. 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
#86. Quite simply, no matter how hard you try, no matter how "open" you are, you'll end up surrounded by "yes people." It's hard not to believe people who are repeating your own ideas. Resist the temptation.
Tom Peters
#87. Make an extensive table of project 'deliverables'. Label one column 'as requested'. Create another column labeled 'could be'. Make each 'could be' wild and woolly!
Tom Peters
#88. To meet the demands of the fast-changing competitive scene, we must simply learn to love change as much as we have hated it in the past.
Tom Peters
#89. If your company has a clean-desk policy, the company is nuts and you're nuts to stay there.
Tom Peters
#90. Public Speaking is a skill that can be studied, polished, perfected. Not only can you get good at it, you can get damn good at it and it makes a heck of a difference.
Tom Peters
#91. Organizations exist to serve. Period. Leaders live to serve. Period.
Tom Peters
#92. I know it sounds crazy, but you've got to let what you're going to do find you, rather than you pursuing it.
Tom Peters
#93. 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
#94. The little people will get even, which is one of a thousand reasons why they are not little people at all. If you're a jerk as a leader, you will be torpedoed. And usually it won't be by your vice presidents; it will be on the loading dock at 3am when no supervisors are around.
Tom Peters
#95. The day firing becomes easy is the day to fire yourself.
Tom Peters
#96. The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.
Tom Peters
#97. The 'value added' for most any company, tiny or enormous, comes from the Quality of Experience provided.
Tom Peters
#98. We cannot innovate without opening the door to havoc.
Tom Peters
#99. Many of the innovative companies got their best product ideas from customers. That comes from listening, intently and regularly.
Tom Peters
#100. If silly things were not done, intelligent things would never happen.
Tom Peters
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