Tom Peters Quotes - Page 7

But there's no substitute for getting smarter faster. And the way you get smarter is to screw around vigorously. Try stuff. See what works. See what fails miserably. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.

He who makes the quickest, coolest prototypes reigns!

Community. A friend started a real estate brokerage a few years ago. By the time she'd added her second employee, she was a pillar of her 35,000-person community. No rule says that only the local banker or car dealer can organize the program to raise supplemental funds for the public library or send the high school band on a well-earned special trip. Participating in community affairs, with time more than dollars, is good business from day one. It gets your name around, adds to your distinctiveness, and, best of all, makes you an attractive employer (which is the key to sustained success).

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.

If, as I anticipate, a wide array of personal, portable information/communication devices becomes increasingly important and widespread for information-intensive users, it will be a major challenge for libraries to adapt their content and services to such a diverse technological environment.

Business, life itself, is damned hard work if you wanna be good at it. Actually, that's precisely wrong. 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.

Hire disrespectful people.

It's relatively simple. If we're not getting more, better, faster than they are getting more, better, faster, then we're getting less, no better or more worse.

I still read quite a few printed books, but if something is available in digital format I do not print it before I read it.

Business isn't some disembodied bloodless enterprise. Profit is fine - a sign that the customer honors the value of what we do. But "enterprise" ( a lovely word ) is about heart. About beauty. It's about art. About people throwing themselves on the line. It's about passion and the selfless pursuit of an ideal.

...high end does not necessarily equal high price. It's a matter of attitude.

We are no doubt in the Great Age of the Brand.

Anybody who is an entrepreneur is a person who essentially has impaired judgment. The odds of success are zilch. This valley is loaded to the gills with a whole lot of totally insane people who honest to God believe that they can be the next Bill Gates or the next Scott McNealy. And that is genuinely stupid.

Champions are pioneers, and pioneers get shot at. The companies that get the most from champions, therefore, are those that have rich support network so their pioneers will flourish. This point is so important it's hard to overstress. No support systems, no champions. No champions, no innovations.

Train everyone lavishly. You can't overspend on training.

Want to accomplish something, any-damn-thing? Sharpen your political skills!

'In Search of Excellence' - even the title - is a reminder that business isn't dry, dreary, boring, or by the numbers. Life at work can be cool - and work that's cool isn't confined to Tiger Woods, Yo-Yo Ma, or Tom Hanks. It's available to all of us and any of us.

Remember: You are the only human being in the world who can help this particular customer at this particular moment in time.

Many flagship state universities have wonderful digital libraries that are accessed by people around the world. In future, if not current, budget crises, trustees, board members, and administrators may wonder why these state institutions - with an articulated primary clientele of students, faculty, and staff members and a secondary clientele of all citizens of the state - should be spending resources on a digital library that is used by many people beyond the primary and secondary service populations.

I believe in the age of the Internet, Facebook and Twitter, that relationships are everything.

I want the public as well as libraries and schools to enjoy unlimited access to public-domain books. This means no charges for these kind of texts themselves.

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

One simply cannot pay tribute to Stephen Covey without saying at the outset that he was a lovely human being.

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.

The most important and visible outcropping of the action bias in excellent companies is their willingness to try things out, to experiment. If you wait until you believe you are safe, sure to be without occasional foolish feelings, you've most likely waited too long.