Best 268 quotes of Tom Peters on MyQuotes

Accept change as a friend. And don't take yourself too seriously.

A completely free library is as rare as a truly free lunch.

Advantage comes not from the spectacular or the technical. Advantage comes from a persistent seeking of the mundane edge.

A little (or more) boat burning would do many enterprises a world of good.

All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.

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

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

An ability to embrace new ideas, routinely challenge old ones, and live with paradox will be the effective leader's premier trait.

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!

An era similar to the one in which the black rotary phone dominated its product category may not recur anytime soon.

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.

A passive approach to professional growth will leave you by the wayside.

Appreciation, applause, approval, respect - we all love it!

Are you placing enough interesting, freakish, long shot, weirdo bets?

As a consumer, you want to associate with brands whose powerful presence creates a halo effect that rubs off on you.

As far as I'm concerned, the first business leader who was able to establish a cult of personality around his tenure was Lee Iacocca.

As project chief you are creating a narrative, a story, a good yarn. If you look at the process-journey that way, you and your gang will ... dramatically up the odds of a WOW outcome!

Authority never matches responsibility. That's one of the great myths and delusions of all times. Winning managers and individual performers at all levels know that effectiveness means building your own network and creating your own authority. Those who succeed always reach far beyond formal deputation, take initiatives, and take the heat when things go awry. That's true in the military in times of war, true for 200 person manufacturing firms, and true at giant automakers or software companies.

Authors and publishers want fair compensation and a means of protecting content through digital rights management. Vendors and technology companies want new markets for e-book reading devices and other hardware. End-users most of all want a wide range and generous amount of high-quality content for free or at reasonable costs. Like end-users, libraries want quality, quantity, economy, and variety as well as flexible business models.

A vibrant, rich, growing corpus of public-domain books is a vital public good - similar to parks, the infrastructure of basic services, and other hallmarks of any advanced society.

A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.

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

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.

Be guided by the axiom: There are no limits to the ability to contribute on the part of a properly selected, well-trained, appropriately supported, and, above all, committed person.

Books were rare,expensive, time-consuming to create and copy, and difficult to transport. That is why collections ofprint-based books developed around centers of religious belief, learning, and wealth. It was cheaper andeasier for people to come to the collection than for the collection, or parts of the collection, to go to thepeople.

Brand inside is more important than brand outside for sustained success.

Business book writing for me is when some set of ideas gets stuck in my mind, I write a book about it. I haven't got a theory and I haven't got a framework.

Business is about people. It's about passion. It's about bold ideas, bold small ideas or bold large ideas.

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.

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.

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.

Celebrate what you want to see more of.

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.

Change is not so much about being the first one to embrace a new idea, but being the first to forget an old one

Collections of books and other documents, either printed or electronic, are a form of congregation.

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).

Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.

Companies have got to learn to eat change for breakfast.

Confidence means non-paralysis, a willingness to act, and act decisively, to start new things and cut failing ventures off.

Cost does not equal value... and low cost parts decrease brand equity for a very long time.

Creating in all employees the awareness that their best efforts are essential and that they will share in the rewards of the company's success.

Customers perceive service in their own unique, idiosyncratic, emotional, irrational, end-of-the-day, and totally human terms. Perception is all there is!

Design is so critical it should be on the agenda of every meeting in every single department.

Develop a respect and reverence for the principle of variation: the idea that the message ain't in the mean, the mode or the median - it's in the differences that occur throughout a population.

Digital content and electronic networks have changed the basic environmental conditionsin which documents are created, distributed, and used.

Digital ink technology holds substantial promise in terms of legibility, portability, and power consumption, but I am less confident about the communication aspect.

Divas do it, golfers do it, pilots do it, violists do it, sprinters do it, soldiers do it, surgeons do it, astronauts do it...only business people think it isn't necessary to train.

Do it, fix it, try it.

Don't let the vision be shot through with holes, but be damn sure some of your best and brightest are shooting at it -- with bazookas as well as sniper's rifles.

Don't 'tolerate' mistakes. Embrace them!