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The common wisdom is that … managers have to learn to motivate people. Nonsense. Employees bring their own motivation.

Tom Peters

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

Clean Desk Company Nuts Office Policy
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

Believe Friends Ideas
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

Leader Right Timer Version War Winning
Entrepreneurs have no memories. They take on the world with a completely fresh view.
TOM PETERS

Entrepreneur Memories Views
The idea of intimately entwining with customers [to get ideas] is an idea whose time has come.
TOM PETERS

Customers Ideas Intimately
The number one premise of business is that it need not be boring or dull. It ought to be fun. If it’s not fun, you’re wasting your life.
TOM PETERS

Business Creativity Fun
Become a “learning organization”. Shuck your arrogance – “if it isn’t our idea, it can’t be that good” – and become a determined copycat/ adapter/ enhancer.
TOM PETERS

Arrogance Ideas Organization
Don’t ‘tolerate’ mistakes. Embrace them!
TOM PETERS

Business Mistake Training
The world has not just “turned upside down”. It is turning in every which way at an accelerating pace.
TOM PETERS

Accelerating Pace Way World
The dominant culture in most big companies demands punishment for a mistake, no matter how useful, small, invisible.
TOM PETERS

Culture Mistake Punishment
…high end does not necessarily equal high price. It’s a matter of attitude.
TOM PETERS

Attitide Attitude Matter
The delivery and presentation media are important, and each format has its advantages and disadvantages, but ultimately I just want to read what I want to read, when and where I want.
TOM PETERS

Important Media Ultimately Want
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

Educational Funny Leadership
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

Giving Thinking Understand Years
Confidence means non-paralysis, a willingness to act, and act decisively, to start new things and cut failing ventures off.
TOM PETERS

Cutting Mean Motivational Ventures
The company’s most urgent task is to learn to welcome, beg for, demand – innovation from everyone.
TOM PETERS

Demand Innovation Tasks

The common wisdom is that … managers have to learn to motivate people. Nonsense. Employees bring their own motivation.

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Popular Authors

The common wisdom is that … managers have to learn to motivate people. Nonsense. Employees bring their own motivation.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Tom Peters Quotes