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In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-run Companies (Paperback)
by Tom Peters, Robert Waterman
| Category:
Management, Corporate Excellence, Art of Excellence, Business |
| Market price: ¥ 178.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
The first management blockbuster and still a classic to be read and re-read. |
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Author: Tom Peters, Robert Waterman
Publisher: Collins
Pub. in: March, 2004
ISBN: 0060548789
Pages: 400
Measurements: 8.0 x 5.5 x 1.0 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00001
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- Awards & Credential -
A business classic that has sold more than 5 million copies. |
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- MSL Picks -
The seminal management book In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, was published in 1982. It is by far the world’s best-selling business book. It was slow to take off on both sides of the Atlantic, but its reputation rocketed by word of mouth and suddenly companies were ordering ’50, 100, 200 copies to give to their executives,’ as the publisher recalls. It reached the million mark in sales in record time, within a year, and has now sold over 5 million copies. Today In Search of Excellence still endlessly reprints in paperback. With the phenomenal success of the book, today Tom Peters and Michael Porter can probably claim to be the most sought-after and expensive management lecturers in the world.
Peters and Waterman found eight common themes which they argued were responsible for the success of the chosen corporations, which have become pointers for managers ever since.
The platform for Peters and Waterman onto which the In Search Of Excellence research and theorizing was built, was the McKinsey 7-S model:
1) Structure
2) Strategy
3) Systems
4) Style of management
5) Skills - corporate strengths
6) Staff
7) Shared values
Peters and Waterman examined 43 of Fortune 500's top performing companies. They started with a list of 62 of the best performing McKinsey clients and then applied performance measures to weed out what they thought to be the weaker companies. General Electric was one of the casualties which failed to make the cut. Peters says that one of his personal drivers in carrying out his research was to prove that certain established methods - particularly heavily systemized philosophies and practices - were wrong, notably those used by Xerox, and advocated by Peter Drucker and Robert McNamara. Peters says that he wanted - with a passion - to prove how crucial people are to business success, and to release business from the 'tyranny of the bean counters’.
The message of In Search of Excellence is simple: 1) people 2) customers and 3) action.
Here is a summary of the In Search of Excellence 8 themes, which also forms the 8 chapters of the book:
1) A bias for action, active decision making - 'getting on with it'.
2) Close to the customer - learning from the people served by the business.
3) Autonomy and entrepreneurship - fostering innovation and nurturing 'champions'.
4) Productivity through people - treating rank and file employees as a source of quality.
5) Hands-on, value-driven - management philosophy that guides everyday practice - management showing its commitment.
6) Stick to the knitting - stay with the business that you know.
7) Simple form, lean staff - some of the best companies have minimal HQ staff.
8) Simultaneous loose-tight properties - autonomy in shop-floor activities plus centralized values.
Target readers:
Executives, managers, entrepreneurs, government and nonprofit leaders, management consultants, professionals, and MBAs.
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Tom Peters and Robert Waterman (Thomas J. Peters, "Super-guru of business" (Fortune and The Economist), is the author of many international bestsellers, including A Passion for Excellence and Thriving on Chaos. Peters, "the father of the post-modern corporation" (Los Angeles Times), is the chairman of Tom Peters Company and lives in Vermont.)
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From the Publisher:
The "Greatest Business Book of All Time" (Bloomsbury UK), In Search of Excellence has long been a must-have for the boardroom, business school, and bedside table.
Based on a study of forty-three of America's best-run companies from a diverse array of business sectors, In Search of Excellence describes eight basic principles of management - action-stimulating, people-oriented, profit-maximizing practices - that made these organizations successful.
Joining the HarperBusiness Essentials series, this phenomenal bestseller features a new Authors' Note, and reintroduces these vital principles in an accessible and practical way for today's management reader.
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We all think we’re tops. We’re exuberantly, wildly irrational about ourselves. And that has sweeping implications for organizing. Yet most organizations, we find, take a negative view of their people. They verbally berate participants for poor performance… They call for risk taking but punish even tiny failures. They want innovation but kills the spirit of the champion. With their rationalist hats on, they design systems that seem calculated to tear down their worker’s self-image. They might not mean to be doing that, but they are.
The message that comes through so poignantly in the studies we reviewed is that we like to think ourselves as winners. The lesson that the excellent companies have to teach is that there is no reason why we can’t design systems that continually reinforce this notion; most of their people are made to feel that they are winners. Their populations are distributed around the normal curve, just like other large population, but the difference is that their systems reinforce degrees of winning rather than degrees of losing. Their people by and large make their targets and quotas, because the targets and quotas are set (often by the people themselves) to allow that to happen.
In the not-so-excellent companies, the reverse is true. While IBM explicitly manages to ensure 70-80% of its salespeople meet quotas, another company (an IBM competitor in part of its product line) works it so that 40% of the sales force meets its quotas during a typical year. With this approach, at least 60% of the salespeople think of themselves as losers. They resent it and that leads to dysfunctional, unpredictable, frenetic behavior. Label a man a loser and he’ll act like one. As one GM manager noted, “Our control systems are designed under the apparent assumption that 90% of the people are lazy ne’er-do-wells, just waiting to lie, cheat, steal, or otherwise screw us. We demoralize 95% of the work force who do act as adults by designing systems to cover our tails against the 5% who are really bad actors.
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| View all 11 comments |
John Naisbitt (Author of Megatrends), USA
<2006-12-19 00:00>
Perfectly tuned, well documented… I heartily recommend and strongly urge you to read and digest In Search of Excellence. |
Ben Rossen, The Netherlands
<2006-12-19 00:00>
Like many groundbreaking works, this one must be seen as important when it was written for what it said then, and important now for what it has led to. Inspired, without doubt, by the monumental Drucker study of IBM, it took case analysis a step further. Its seminal ideas are found in many contemporary studies and schools or management thinking which have taken these principles yet further.
That doesn't mean it should no longer be read. But, after reading it, and to get the most from reading it, other contemporary works should be included in your reading list. For example, Jim Collins' Built to Last and Good to Great, and John Roberts' The Modern Firm take Peters and Waterman’s' original insights many steps further. In Search of Excellence however, is unlikely to lose its status as a classic, and the broad strokes of its conclusions will continue to be recognized as timeless principles. |
Craig Cecil (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-19 00:00>
It's amazing how many people have read this classic Peters and Waterman book. It's even more amazing then how most companies have simply ignored the lessons illustrated within, only to continue on their dismal path of mediocrity. The basic lesson to be learned is that if your company religiously follows the core tenets outlined in the book, then your company will be the leader in your industry, because you will be the only company to do so. So why is this circa 1980's book still relevant? Because the principles apply just as much today, and they apply equally well to business of any nature. If you read this book, absorb all of the lessons, and practice them in your daily activities, then you will have learned the most important lesson in your business life. |
Vick (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-19 00:00>
This book was written 22 years ago (in 1982) and seems to have stood the test of time. In fact, the business 'ingredients' delineated in this book have been demonstrated in many major corporations since the book was first published.
Essentially the book hinges on 8 basic principles. If any business can put these 8 basic principles into practice, Peters and Waterman say that business can not help but succeed. Now the success may not be as large as Microsoft, but success will occur at one level or the other. If you do not agree then that is fine, Peters and Waterman give several examples of small business that became huge business on the basis of these 8 principles (e.g. Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Delta Airlines, McDonald's, IBM, etc.). In fact, when you read the book (which is actually structured around describing and demonstrating these 8 principles) you will see why and how these principles actually work.
One of the most interesting things I found in this book was the fact that the 8 principles are essentially common sense ingredients. For lack of better way to describe them, 'boy scout' type principles that can be incorporated into business action on an every day basis.
The book itself is very interesting, easy to read (even if you are not very interested in reading about businesses, business growth and management, etc.) and easy to understand. There are some great business stories about customers, business action, business men and their thinking, etc. Chapter 4 is quite theoretically and somewhat difficult to wade through, but has some great insights on management, measuring earnings, business theories and strategies, and how culture plays a part in business growth based on a businesses values in relation to the culture as opposed to a business values in relation to just making money.
This is one of the better business books I have read in a long while and I do recommend it for anyone who is about to start a business, who actually own a business, or for anyone who merely love reading business books. |
View all 11 comments |
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