Thomas J. Peters Quotes

What is my personal strategy for the next 10 hours? Who can I talk with or what can I volunteer for to learn something new?

Punctuality at meetings influences culture of punctuality, i.e., promise-keeping in general, on-time deliveries, etc.

Organizations exist only to serve. Leaders exist only to serve.

someone with whom I have an intimate relationship

Make the collective, professional pursuit of listening skills per se a keystone of corporate 'culture'.

Passionate servant leaders, determined to create a legacy of earthshaking transformation in their domain create/must necessarily create organizations which are ... no less than Cathedrals in which the full and awesome power of the Imagination and Spirit and native Entrepreneurial flair of diverse individuals is unleashed ... In passionate pursuit of jointly perceived soaring purpose and personal and community and client service Excellence.

In the age of advancing AI, humans’ advantage is diversity—twists and turns and acts of customer love and amazement that the algorithms can’t match!

in it with me for the long haul

An organization, no matter how ‘technologically transformed,’ is at the end of the day no more/no less than: PEOPLE SERVING PEOPLE. (And as leader, your job is: SERVE THE PEOPLE WHO SERVE THE PEOPLE.) (One last thing: The people we serve are our Customers AND our Communities.)

Without exception, the dominance and coherence of culture proved to be an essential quality of the excellent companies.

Hire for all jobs based on empathy. Employ people who care about people; everything else can be trained.

I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote Search. There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove. I went out and talked to genuinely smart, remarkably interesting, first-rate people. I had an infinite travel budget that allowed me to fly first class and stay at top-notch hotels and a license from McKinsey to talk to as many cool people as I could all around the United States and the world. I went to see Karl Weick, who had totally influenced my life. I had read his work a thousand times, and I'd never met him. I went to Oslo to talk with , who had studied empowerment on oil tankers. I went to the in London, where the leading thinkers on organizational development were looking at why people work together effectively in team configurations under certain circumstances. Word of the meeting got back to McKinsey USA, and I was invited to give a presentation to the top management of PepsiCo... The time was drawing near for the Pepsi presentation to take place. One morning at about 6, I sat down at my desk overlooking the San Francisco Bay from the 48th floor of the Bank of America Tower, and I closed my eyes. Then I leaned forward, and I wrote down eight things on a pad of paper. Those eight things haven't changed since that moment. They were the eight basic principles of Search.

The ... moral responsibility ... of every leader is staggering—an opportunity to be of service to (literally) civilization. Or not.

If you want to achieve Excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less than Excellent work. The first 99.9% of getting from here to there is the determination to do it and not to compromise, no matter what set of road blocks those around you erect.

The Peters Principles: Enthusiasm. Emotion. Excellence. Energy. Excitement. Service. Growth. Creativity. Imagination. Vitality. Joy. Surprise. Independence. Spirit. Community. Limitless human potential. Diversity. Profit. Innovation. Design. Quality. Entrepreneurialism. Wow.