Menu

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Tom Peters Quotes

If a window of opportunity appears, don’t pull down the shade.

– Tom Peters

Mittelstand companies are incredibly focused and almost always family-run. The young men and women go through the apprenticeship system and learn that the goal is excellence.

– Tom Peters

All white-collar work is project work. The single salient fact that touches all of our lives is that work is being reinvented.

– Tom Peters

If your company has a clean-desk policy, the company is nuts and you’re nuts to stay there.

– Tom Peters

Design is so critical it should be on the agenda of every meeting in every single department.

– Tom Peters

Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing… layout, processes, and procedures.

– Tom Peters

Everyone has a chance to learn, improve, and build up their skills.

– Tom Peters

Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.

– Tom Peters

All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.

– Tom Peters

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

‘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

Remember my mantra: distinct… or extinct.

– Tom Peters

For the blue-collar worker, the driving force behind change was factory automation using programmable machine tools. For the office worker, it’s office automation using computer technology: enterprise-resource-planning systems, groupware, intranets, extranets, expert systems, the Web, and e-commerce.

– Tom Peters

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

Business is about people. It’s about passion. It’s about bold ideas, bold small ideas or bold large ideas.

– Tom Peters

Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.

– Tom Peters

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

Communication is everyone’s panacea for everything.

– Tom Peters

The best leaders… almost without exception and at every level, are master users of stories and symbols.

– Tom Peters

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

The top athletes are consummate pros who work obsessively at their craft. Approach yours the same way.

– Tom Peters

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

Give a lot, expect a lot, and if you don’t get it, prune.

– Tom Peters

Celebrate what you want to see more of.

– Tom Peters

Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.

– Tom Peters

The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.

– Tom Peters

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

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.

– Tom Peters

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

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

- 1
- 2