Tom Peters Quotes - Page 8

Forget all the conventional 'rules' but one. There is one golden rule: Stick to topics you deeply care about and don't keep your passion buttoned inside your vest. An audience's biggest turn-on is the speaker's obvious enthusiasm. If you are lukewarm about the issue, forget it!

When you choose a managerial path, you are choosing to devote your life to people. Period.

Make an extensive table of project 'deliverables'. Label one column 'as requested'. Create another column labeled 'could be'. Make each 'could be' wild and woolly!

Think about the market, think about the design, and think about who is going to design for that market. Hit the mark.

Stellar teams are invariably made up of quirky individuals who typically rub each other raw, but they figure out - with the spiritual help of a gifted leader - how to be their peculiar selves and how to win championships as a team...at the same time.

You are who you go to lunch with! Break bread with cool and you will become more cool. Conversely: break bread with dull and well, you can figure it out.

Power lies in the details, and the tenacious pursuit of such hidden levers can pay off enormously. While you don't want to get a reputation as a prissy worrywart, worrying about the details in private is important. You may think you are the world's greatest speaker, but if the auditorium's sound system is singing static - well, forget it.

Because nearly all digital libraries are tied to bricks-and-mortar institutions, the funding base tends to be quite localized.

We all know of the dangers and inequities of the traditional digital divide: People who have good access tocomputer networks have a distinct advantage - in terms of both life opportunities and quality of life, I wouldargue - over the vast majority of the world's population that does not yet have good access to computernetworks. The "other" digital divide points to an increasingly unstable situation that has developed inlibrarianship as digital libraries have evolved and matured.

Screw-ups are the mark of excellence.

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

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.

One potential long-term problem with many current digital libraries is that they grew out of and aresupported by bricks-and-mortar libraries. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with that arrangement, inreality it creates a potentially dangerous situation that I call "the other digital divide."

The idea of intimately entwining with customers [to get ideas] is an idea whose time has come.

There's nobody in the world that wouldn't change places with the Americans. The economy is phenomenally large, the entrepreneurial class is very alive and very well, the universities, despite budget problems, still turn out something like 90 percent of the refereed academic and technical articles in the world. There's a lot on everybody's agenda.

We often hear that the digital age has resulted in a devaluing of time, space, and place. But I wonder if theseclaims are exaggerated.

Now it is much faster and cheaper to bring thedocument to the user, rather than ask the user to come to the document or collection.

Gandhi and Mandela and Churchill and JFK and Reagan and Thatcher and Sarkozy and Franklin and Washington set the tone to an incredible degree-their "personal style" was their "brand." ("It" starts with personal style of the tip-top leadership team. Sorry to be politically insensitive, but who would give a hoot about Tibet if it weren't for the look and style of the Dalai Lama?) Boss at any level: You're either on the "it" boat-or not.

If the other guy is getting better, then you'd better be getting better faster than the other guy is getting better... or you're getting worse.

Musing on the phrase 'waste of time.' So much more complex than it appears. Many 'wastes of time' small talk, daydreaming are imperatives.

You are your projects!

My half-baked reading of history is that we continue to go through these waves of entrepreneurial explosion followed by merger mania and consolidation. Out of that come big sluggish companies that eventually collapse under the weight of what they've created, and are killed off by the next wave of entrepreneurs.

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.

The unthinkable is thinkable. No: likely.

Skill at creating, exploiting, and exiting crucial alliances beats ownership of fixed assets