In Search Of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies (Profile Business Classics)

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It’s this final point that I find most interesting. In the zeitgeist of the day, they were truly incredible organizations with enviable performance, widely admired leaders, and strong cultures. So looking at what happened to them makes for a great natural experiment where the company’s quality is a given – the variable is the context in which it operated. According to the Wall Street Journal, In Search of Excellence is "One of those rare books on management that is both consistently thought-provoking and fun to read." The Brand You50: Fifty Ways to Transform Yourself from an 'Employee' into a Brand That Shouts Distinction, Commitment, and Passion! While writing The Excellence Dividend, Tom called it by various names, all of which suggested that the book contains everything he's learned in his 35-plus years of writing and speaking on the best practices for businesses and their leaders. In those 35 years, he never stopped studying what's new and making his best predictions for what's to come next. This book focuses all Tom's knowledge on how to manage your business in this time of exponentially accelerating change. Not surprisingly, he has a great deal to say about how you treat your people, and that your focus should be on striving for Excellence. Michael Goldhaber, writing in Wired, said, "If there is nothing very special about your work, no matter how hard you apply yourself you won't get noticed, and that increasingly means you won't get paid much either. In times past you could be obscure yet secure—now that's much harder."

What happened to the world’s “greatest” companies?

Greatness is no guarantee of survival. It seems the 18 organizations featured in Built to Last really were built to last, as all the companies in the BTL portfolio are still around. The other two portfolios have quite a few dropouts, however. During the 20-year evaluation period, about 1 in 7 disappeared as independent entities. Two well-performing companies were acquired ( Amoco and Gillette bought by BP and P&G respectively). Four low performers were also swallowed up ( Amdahl, Data General, DEC and Raychem), and three filed for bankruptcy ( Kmart, Wang and Circuit City). Another five fell off the list after the period we evaluated, including Kodak’s famous bankruptcy in 2013. This is what we call the WOW Project. It's obvious ... in retrospect. The common denominator-bottom line for both the professional service firm/PSF and the individual/Brand You ... is the project. And for the cool individual in the cool professional service firm there is only one answer: the cool project. THE PROJECT IS IT. I HAVE SPENT MY LIFE IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRMS. I AM MY PROJECTS. I AM AS COOL—OR UNCOOL—AS MY PROJECTS. PERIOD. MY PROJECTS ARE MY LIFE. MY PROJECTS ARE MY LEGACY. PERIOD. Motorola and Sony struggled to adapt to the Apple era, while Pitney Bowes (postage) and Kodak (film) were built on and failed to pivot from declining technologies. The emergence of global manufacturing also seemed to catch former greats such as Dana and Raychem on the wrong side. Published in 1994, The Pursuit of WOW! was served up as "a practical guide to impractical times." It's built on 210 numbered observations, all with a common bond of stepping out and standing out from the growing crowd of look-alikes. Along with the best of his columns, Peters includes questions and rebuttals that come from readers and listeners, as well as his own candid responses. Tom writes that The Pursuit of WOW! is "a clarion call for more personal and organizational spiciness in a world that will tolerate nothing less."Tom isn't only the best selling business author of all time, he's one of the business world's engaging and challenging speakers. After requests from thousands of his seminar participants for paper copies of the visual aids used in his seminars, Tom published The Tom Peters Seminar as his answer. The book contains the contents of a two-day Tom Peters seminar in early 1994. It's loaded with "how-to's," and it challenges its readers to reach beyond reengineering, total quality management, and empowerment, towards reinvention and revolution. So what did we find? If you bought a portfolio of these companies and held them for two decades, you would have beaten the index by 1.7%. Not bad! GTG is in the lead at a 2.6% outperformance, followed by BTL at 1.6% and ISOE at 1.5%. Published in 1992, almost 10 years to the day after In Search of Excellence, Liberation Management focuses largely on how the inflexible, hierarchical, bureaucratic, organizational structures of the past were being consigned to the shredder and replaced with semi-permanent networks of small, autonomous, project-oriented teams. While evolving the flexibility theme of Thriving on Chaos to deal with the accelerating pace of business change in the early '90s, Liberation Management shows the genesis of Tom's thinking on some of his most important concepts in 1999: Project work and the professional service firm as the model organization for the new economy, along with the self as brand. Women are where it's at! And Boomers and Geezers are where damn near ALL the loot is! How you respond to emerging trends and exploit their potential is key to the success of your organization. Create a strategic vision for the future with revolutionary new ideas from Tom Peters and Martha Barletta. Discover how marketing to women is "the biggest trend in the world." Find out how you can target the aging population. Think about making that strategic realignment. A key—perhaps THE key—to leadership is the effective communication of a story. Instead of looking for things that have gone wrong in your organization and trying to fix them ... look for things that went right and try to build on them. Make work matter and give the WOW! factor free reign in your organization. Discover passion, persistence, and imagination to get results. Think weird and learn how to thrive in a disruptive age.

Getting Weird Design The Heart Boss- In Work Talent Branding

Given the state of our world today Tom sets an even higher bar and will show how excellence in leadership is achieved by an obsessive focus on the growth of those you are leading. Called "the first piece of postmodern management literature" by the Los Angeles Times, The Circle of Innovation boldly claims that "you can't shrink your way to greatness." It's about one BIG idea—innovation—that our fast-moving times (and customers) demand. With bold graphics and chapter titles such as "We are all Michelangelos," "Create waves of lust," and "You can't live life without an eraser," The Circle of Innovation challenges us all to transform our organizations, our careers, and ourselves. Great companies were more likely to do really badly than really well. Their odds of outperforming the market were 52-48, hardly better than a coin toss. But there are more big losers than big winners on the lists. Just eight companies outperformed the index by more than 5%, while twice that number underperformed by the same percentage. Given the difficulty of beating the market, it’s no surprise that the biggest group is in the middle band of +/-2%.Funny thing ... the work itself always seems missing in most discussions of "management." (Maybe it's because we've expended so little energy studying white collar work.) September 7, 2017Three books sit on more executives’ bookshelves than any others: In Search of Excellence (1982), Built to Last (1994), and Good to Great (2001). They turned their authors into management gurus, especially Tom Peters ( In Search of Excellence) and Jim Collins (the other two titles).