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

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

Culture Mistake Punishment
It may be primarily property taxes in the case of a public library, or state taxes and tuition in the case of an academic library at a public university, but the funding sources of most libraries continue to have a strong geographic component.
TOM PETERS

Academic Library Strong Tuition
Vision is dandy, but sustainable company excellence comes from a huge stable of able managers.
TOM PETERS

Able Excellence Vision
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
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
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
Today brands are everything, and all kinds of products and services – from accounting firms to sneaker makers to restaurants – are figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded by a Tommy Hilfiger-like buzz.
TOM PETERS

Buzz Figure Sneakers Today Transcend
Forget loyalty. Or at least loyalty to one’s corporation. Try loyalty to your Rolodex-your network-instead.
TOM PETERS

Corporations Loyalty Trying
The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.
TOM PETERS

Design Issues Mistakes Something Understanding
With most competitors moving ever faster, the race will go to those who listen (and respond) most intently.
TOM PETERS

Faster Moving Race
Business ceases to be work when you’re chasing a dream that has engorged you. (“Work should be more fun than fun” – Noel Coward.) And if the passion isn’t there. then biotech and plumbing will be equal drags.
TOM PETERS

Biotech Business Cease Dream Engorged
Some people have argued that listening to a work of literature does not really promote literacy in the same way that reading does.
TOM PETERS

Challenges People Reading
If there is a single tragic flaw that mars our biggest enterprises, it is conservatism – the failure to fail, and fail big, in an era of unprecedented volatility and ambiguity.
TOM PETERS

Ambiguity Era Flaws Mars Unprecedented Volatility
Don’t ‘tolerate’ mistakes. Embrace them!
TOM PETERS

Business Mistake Training
Garbage! Intuition is the new physics. It’s an Einsteinian, seven-sense, practical way to make tough decisions. Bottom line, circa 2001 to 2010: The crazier the times are, the more important it is for leaders to develop and to trust their intuition.
TOM PETERS

Decision Important Intuition More Practical Tough

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

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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