Tom Peters Quotes about Business

Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.

The thing that keeps a business ahead of the competition is excellence in execution.

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

Don't 'tolerate' mistakes. Embrace them!

If you love your company and love what you do, you will serve your customers better-period!

WORK ON YOUR STORY! He/she who has the best story wins! In life! In business! The White House!

Treat the customer as an appreciating asset.

And remember: Everything in business is a paradox. To be excellent, you have to be consistent. When you're consistent, you're vulnerable to attack. Yes, it's a paradox. Now deal with it!

Who comes first? Don't be silly, says King Hal; it's employees. That is - and this dear Watson, is elementary - if you genuinely want to put customers first, you must put employees more first.

Formula for success: Underpromise and overachieve.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh Lord, there it is again. The question;" What kind of business should I start?" Incidentially, it has a twin that also sets me off: "What should I specialize in during the second year of my MBA studies?" Sorry, but those are two of the most profoundly upsetting questions anyone can ask - upsetting because the answer should be obvious: Do what turns you on, not what the statistics say is best.

Like it or not - and often we don't - power is a pervasive phenomenon. From midnight decisions in the Oval Office that risk the lives of young Americans to quarrels over the kitchen table, power is part of every human equation. Yes, it can be - and often is - abused, in business as in all arenas of endeavor. But it can also be used to do great good for great numbers. And as a career-building tool, the slow and steady (and subtle) amassing of power is the surest road to success.

Who, precisely, are your Dreamers? Are their Dreams in Technicolor? Do you allow their most Outrageous Dreams to be seen in public?

Steve Jobs is perhaps the most competitive human being I have ever met in my life, and yet I would argue one of the most artistic human beings I have ever met in my life. You can trash the movies all you want, but they do have an artistic component. And yet brutal competition knows no peers when it comes to Hollywood.

In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.