Gurus

/ 01 June 2009

Tom Peters

Tom Peters
1942 – present
American

‘Excellent companies are both centralised and decentralised’

Tom Peters is the co-author of what was for over 20 years the bestselling business book of all time. In Search of Excellence, written with his fellow McKinsey consultant Robert Waterman, was first published in the US in 1982, when corporate America was overwhelmed by Japan’s superiority in manufacturing and needed reminding that there was still excellence to be found back home.

It is not, however, as a writer that Peters is best known. He became the first (and most outstanding) exponent of the late 20th-century phenomenon of the management lecture. Energetic, lively and entertaining, he wowed crowds of executives from Hamburg to Hong Kong, the leader of a regular (and highly influential) migration of American gurus spreading the gospel of American management excellence to all corners of the earth.

Peters based the ideas in Excellence on experience that he and Waterman gained when working with American companies as management consultants for McKinsey in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There they had been in contact with a fellow consultant, Richard Pascale, who had used McKinsey’s framework of the Seven Ss to explain the growing superiority at that time of Japanese industry and management methods.

Kathryn Harrigan, a Columbia Business School professor, attributed some of the book’s success to the fact that: ‘Americans are into cults, particularly the cult of the personality. They are all looking for the recipe of success, and Tom Peters made the best job of that. People knew exactly where
to place him.’

Peters started Thriving on Chaos, his second book, with the memorable line: ‘There are no excellent companies.’ This was after several of the so-called excellent companies in the first book had chalked up some far-from-excellent performances.

The focus of Peters’ later work was the management of continuous change in a chaotic world. His books became ever more populist. Re-imagine, published in 2003, contains lots of short sidebars, exclamation marks and pictures of things such as frogs leaping.

Extracted from Guide to management ideas and gurus, written by Tim Hindle.