Tom Peters quotes

The Peters Principles: Enthusiasm. Emotion. Excellence. Energy. Excitement. Service. Growth. Creativity. Imagination. Vitality. Joy. Surprise. Independence. Spirit. Community. Limitless human potential. Diversity. Profit. Innovation. Design. Quality. Entrepreneurialism. Wow.

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.

Every excellent company we studied is clear on what it stands for, and takes the process of value shaping seriously. In fact, we wonder whether it is possible to be an excellent company without clarity on values and without having the right sorts of values.

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?

Bosses: You make your living going to meetings. Hence any meeting that does not bubble and incite enthusiasm is a forever-lost opportunity.

The vitality of our network will determine our professional fate.

Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.

Lists simplify, clarify, edify.

What gets measured gets done.

Without exception, the dominance and coherence of culture proved to be an essential quality of the excellent companies.

Do not even flippantly badmouth anybody this week. Button it up.

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!

Life is too short for non-WOW projects.

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.

If not excellence, what? If not excellence now, when?

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. I went out and talked to genuinely smart, remarkably interesting, first-rate people. I had an infinite travel budget that allowed me to fly first class and stay at top-notch hotels and a license from McKinsey to talk to as many cool people as I could all around the United States and the world.
I went to see Karl Weick, who had totally influenced my life. I had read his work a thousand times, and I'd never met him. I went to Oslo to talk with Einar Thorsrud, who had studied empowerment on oil tankers. I went to the Tavistock Institute in London, where the leading thinkers on organizational development were looking at why people work together effectively in team configurations under certain circumstances.
Word of the meeting got back to McKinsey USA, and I was invited to give a presentation to the top management of PepsiCo... The time was drawing near for the Pepsi presentation to take place. One morning at about 6, I sat down at my desk overlooking the San Francisco Bay from the 48th floor of the Bank of America Tower, and I closed my eyes. Then I leaned forward, and I wrote down eight things on a pad of paper. Those eight things haven't changed since that moment. They were the eight basic principles of Search.