Biography

Tom PETERS

2007 ranking: 7

Tom Peters (b. 1942) is a native of Baltimore. He studied engineering at Cornell, before heading to the west coast to get his MBA and PhD at Stanford. He saw active service in the Vietnam War with the US Navy. In the mid 1970s he joined McKinsey as a consultant, leaving in 1981 to set up his own firm, now part of the Tom Peters Group.

In 1982 appeared In Search of Excellence (written with Robert Waterman, a fellow McKinsey partner). This became the best-selling management book of the twentieth century - the first to reach the best-seller charts. This was soon followed by the nearly as successful A Passion for Excellence (1985).

The book has achieved a cult following. It tied in with the need in the United States in the early 1980s to feel good about being American again. It showed that significant parts of American industry and business were excellent; others could be too. Its simplistic rhetoric earned Peters a wrap over the knuckles from the venerable Peter Drucker. He chided Peters for making “managing sound so incredibly easy. All you have to do is put that book under your pillow and it will get done.”

In Search of Excellence was an American classic. It contained really great stories of do-and-dare about 43 excellent American companies. It was not long on theorising. It is liberally spruced with nuggets of home-spun wisdom: “If a window of opportunity appears, don’t pull down the shade.”

Excellence in business depends on eight ingredients. (1) activism, with people who “do it, fix it [and] try it”
(2) excellent companies “learn from the people they serve”.
(3) they promote entrepreneurship and autonomy
(4) management learns from a “hands-on” approach
(5) workers are valued as the key to achieve productivity
(6) excellent companies stick to their knitting, exploiting their core competencies and not pursuing wild goose chases
(7) they keep their form simple and their staff lean;
(8) they know how to be simultaneously tight-fitting and expansive.

Peters has always been in favour of delegation in a company. The manager can’t know everything. If he tries he’ll get snowed under in useless detail.

A Darwinian approach to the achievement of excellence had to be adopted to achieve excellence. It is better to do something wrong than do nothing: people should not be terrified of making mistakes. The next time they try they’ll learn from it and do it right, or hopefully better. So excellence could be gained incrementally, through a series of small steps bonded by a central message.

He is not a captive to consistency. A lot of the excellent companies praised by him in Excellence have not stood the test of corporate time. Some have disappeared. In today’s world of shifting industry boundaries the notion of telling a company to stick to its knitting seems akin to an order for corporate suicide. But Peters doesn’t mind changing his tune.

He believes now that there are no excellent companies. He modified the message. It was no longer enough to be excellent: companies have to stand out from the crowd. Companies have to shrink, even deconstruct. They have to innovate. They must make the workplace more interesting.

Old structures are redundant. They were obstructing progress. In Liberation Management (1992) pronounced the death of middle management in with the sentence: “… middle managers as we have known them are cooked geese.” The individual employee increasingly has to brand himself or herself. He prophesies an increasing number of women workers. He welcomes this, women are better than men at working in teams.

He believes that “90 per cent of white-collar Jobs will be totally reinvented/reconceived in the next decade” His interest in crafting the new corporate citizen led to the production of a series of books including The Brand You 50 (1999) and Project 50 (1999).

Peters is a consummate performer, injecting the same messiahnism into his public appearances as is found in his books. A lecture by Tom Peters is a performance, a spectacle even. He is never static. Someone (at an obvious loose end) once calculated that he walks seven miles on stage while giving a lecture. He gives about a hundred talks a year throughout the world. He jokes that that’s why he called his first horse “Frequent Flyer”.

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman were also instrumental in the development of the 7Ss method of isolating management strengths and weaknesses, developed with their former colleague at McKinsey, Richard Pascale.

Essential Reading:
(with Robert H. Waterman)
In Search of Excellence (1982)
A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference (1985)
Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution (1987)
Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties (1992)
The Brand You 50 (1999)

All Biographies