Tom Peters famous quotes

Celebrate what you want to see more of.
-- Tom Peters

#Motivational #Leadership #Gratitude

If a window of opportunity appears, don't pull down the shade.
-- Tom Peters

#Inspirational #Success #Opportunity

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

#Inspirational #Business #Educational

Winners must learn to relish change with the same enthusiasm and energy that we have resisted it in the past.
-- Tom Peters

#Change #Past #Enthusiasm

If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.
-- Tom Peters

#Inspirational #Motivational #Leadership

Public Speaking is a skill that can be studied, polished, perfected. Not only can you get good at it, you can get damn good at it and it makes a heck of a difference.
-- Tom Peters

#Differences #Skills #Public Speaking

Unless you walk out into the unknown, the odds of making a profound difference in your life are pretty low.
-- Tom Peters

#Success #Odds #Differences

Organizations exist to serve. Period. Leaders live to serve. Period.
-- Tom Peters

#Organization #Leader #Entrepreneur

The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.
-- Tom Peters

#Positive #Simple #People

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

#Business #Simplicity #Design

Formula for success: under promise and over deliver.
-- Tom Peters

#Educational #Promise #Formulas

The best leaders are the best notetakers, best askers, and best learners.
-- Tom Peters

#Leader #Learners

You can't think your way out of a box; you've got to act.
-- Tom Peters

#Thinking #Way #Boxes

Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.
-- Tom Peters

#Rewards #Excellent #Mediocre

Swipe from the best, then adapt.
-- Tom Peters

#Innovation

Formula for success: Underpromise and overachieve.
-- Tom Peters

#Business #Formulas #Formula For Success

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.
-- Tom Peters

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Business

There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity
-- Tom Peters

#Integrity #Lapses #Minors

If I read a book that cost me $20 and I get one good idea, I've gotten one of the greatest bargains of all time.
-- Tom Peters

#Book #Ideas #Cost

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

#Growth #Approach #Passive

The new idea either finds a champion or it dies. No ordinary involvement with a new idea provides the energy required to cope with the indifference and resistance that change provokes.
-- Tom Peters

#Ideas #Champion #Resistance

Passion. The life of an entrepreneur is occasionally exhilarating, and almost always exhausting. Only unbridled passion for the concept is likely to see you through the 17-hour days (month after month) and the painful mistakes that are part and parcel of the start-up process.
-- Tom Peters

#Peace #Mistake #Passion

Leaders trust their guts. "Intuition" is one of those good words that has gotten a bad rap. For some reason, intuition has become a "soft" notion. Garbage! Intuition is the new physics. It's an Einsteinian, seven-sense, practical way to make tough decisions. Bottom line, circa 2001 to 2010: The crazier the times are, the more important it is for leaders to develop and to trust their intuition.
-- Tom Peters

#Rap #Decision #Leader

Power lies in the details, and the tenacious pursuit of such hidden levers can pay off enormously. While you don't want to get a reputation as a prissy worrywart, worrying about the details in private is important. You may think you are the world's greatest speaker, but if the auditorium's sound system is singing static - well, forget it.
-- Tom Peters

#Inspirational #Lying #Thinking

It's this simple: You are a brand. You are in charge of your brand. There is no single path to success. And there is no one right way to create the brand called You. Except this: Start today. Or else.
-- Tom Peters

#Simple #Today #Way

We are all Michaelangelos.
-- Tom Peters

#Creative #Be Creative

If no one is pissed-off with you then you are dead but just haven't figured it out yet.
-- Tom Peters

#Knowledge #Learning #Pissed Off

Do it, fix it, try it.
-- Tom Peters

#Excellence #Trying

Nearly 100% of innovation-from business to politics-is inspired not by "market analysis" but by people who are supremely pissed off by the way things are.
-- Tom Peters

#People #Innovation #Analysis

A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand.
-- Tom Peters

#Skills #Careers #Gains

If the person you delegated to does the job twice as well as you would have done it, consider yourself a leader.
-- Tom Peters

#Jobs #Leader #Done

Obviously, despite hard work and heroic efforts, many dreams don't come true. But if we don't dare to dream and then throw muscle, heart, and soul into making the dream come true, then WoW Projects-and all of the emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and financial riches that they bring will surely NOT be our lot in life!
-- Tom Peters

#Dream #Spiritual #Life Changing

The day firing becomes easy is the day to fire yourself.
-- Tom Peters

#Wisdom #Fire #Easy

Don't settle for less than is possible.
-- Tom Peters

#Settling

For the blue-collar worker, the driving force behind change was factory automation using programmable machine tools. For the office worker, it's office automation using computer technology: enterprise-resource-planning systems, groupware, intranets, extranets, expert systems, the Web, and e-commerce.
-- Tom Peters

#Technology #Blue #Office

Remember my mantra: distinct... or extinct.
-- Tom Peters

#Remember

Lavish credit on anyone and everyone who helped you the least bit.
-- Tom Peters

#Rewards #Credit #Recognition

Knowing when to take your losses is an essential part of eventual success.
-- Tom Peters

#Loss #Knowing #Essentials

Excellent firms don't believe in excellence - only in constant improvement and constant change.
-- Tom Peters

#Inspirational #Loyalty #Educational

The best leaders... almost without exception and at every level, are master users of stories and symbols.
-- Tom Peters

#Leader #Stories #Levels

The top athletes are consummate pros who work obsessively at their craft. Approach yours the same way.
-- Tom Peters

#Athlete #Way #Crafts

Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.
-- Tom Peters

#Risk #Tests #Failing

Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.
-- Tom Peters

#Leadership #Business #Insperational

Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.
-- Tom Peters

#Leadership #Vision #Management

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.
-- Tom Peters

#Jobs #Important #Age

There is no such thing as an insignificant improvement.
-- Tom Peters

#Improvement #Insignificant

Only those who constantly retool themselves stand a chance of staying employed in the years ahead.
-- Tom Peters

#Years #Chance #Employed

Everyone has a chance to learn, improve, and build up their skills.
-- Tom Peters

#Skills #Management #Chance

Leadership is about tapping the wellsprings of human motivation - and about fundamental relations with one's fellows.
-- Tom Peters

#Leadership #Motivation #Fundamentals

Listen to Everyone. Ideas come from everywhere
-- Tom Peters

#Ideas

You can only improve what you measure.
-- Tom Peters

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

#Design #Agendas #Should

Leaders understand the ultimate power of relationships.
-- Tom Peters

#Inspirational #Leader #Ultimate

Effective visions are lived in details, not broad strokes.
-- Tom Peters

#Vision #Details #Broads

Never, ever rest on your laurels. Today's laurels are tomorrow's compost.
-- Tom Peters

#History #Today #Tomorrow

Send 10-TEN!!-people flowers. Today. As "Thank yous" for good things "small"-or even large-done in the last two weeks.
-- Tom Peters

#Gratitude #Flower #Two

We are no doubt in the Great Age of the Brand.
-- Tom Peters

#Doubt #Age #Brands

If timing ain't everything, it's damn close
-- Tom Peters

#Timing

Skill at creating, exploiting, and exiting crucial alliances beats ownership of fixed assets
-- Tom Peters

#Skills #Creating #Alliances

They say plan it. I say do it.
-- Tom Peters

#Plans

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.
-- Tom Peters

#Vision #Bazookas #Shooting

Inspiring visions rarely (I'm tempted to say never) include numbers.
-- Tom Peters

#Numbers #Vision #Tempted

Take someone NEW AND WEIRD to lunch today
-- Tom Peters

#Lunch #Today

Don't 'tolerate' mistakes. Embrace them!
-- Tom Peters

#Business #Mistake #Training

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?
-- Tom Peters

#Volunteer #Next #Strategy

One reason (among many) that women may well take over the world of "virtual enterprises" is that they seem to have a greater instinct for networking. And the unfettered-by-machismo males who have taken to networking will do better than those who shun it as "sissy stuff." But truth is, it has always been the age of "networkers"; and in an era where organizations depend more and more on tenuously connected outsiders to get the job done, it will only become so.
-- Tom Peters

#Jobs #Taken #Power

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.
-- Tom Peters

#Creating #Effort #Rewards

The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.
-- Tom Peters

#Ideas #People #World

The principal reason, invariably, most "successful" giant companies rather quickly become also-rans, or just amorphous blobs on the competitive landscape, is their failure to re-tool in anything like a fundamental way. In fact, the worse things get, typically, the more they dig in their heels and defend yesterday's turf.
-- Tom Peters

#Change #Successful #Yesterday

If not excellence, what? If not excellence now, when?
-- Tom Peters

#What If #Excellence

I found myself declaiming, full flower, for an hour on the "utmost importance and urgency" of Blogging, telling him in no uncertain terms that, especially in a high-end niche business, Blogging is "the premier way" to have "intimate conversations" with his Clients. Funny thing, I believe it!
-- Tom Peters

#Funny #Flower #Believe

Want to accomplish something, any-damn-thing? Sharpen your political skills!
-- Tom Peters

#Skills #Political #Want

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.
-- Tom Peters

#Teamwork #Thinking #People

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.
-- Tom Peters

#Limits #Committed #Ability

Transforming leadership, [is defined as] leadership that builds on man's need for meaning, leadership that creates institutional purpose ... he is the value-shaper, the exemplar, the maker of meanings ... he is the true artist, the true pathfinder.
-- Tom Peters

#Men #Artist #Needs

Smile if it kills you. The physiology of smiling diffuses a lot of anger and angst. It makes your body and soul feel better.
-- Tom Peters

#Feel Better #Soul #Body

We cannot innovate without opening the door to havoc.
-- Tom Peters

#Doors #Innovation #Havoc

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!
-- Tom Peters

#Journey #Yarn #Creating

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

#Important #Brands

Lists simplify, clarify, edify.
-- Tom Peters

#Lists #Simplify

I imagine a school system that recognizes learning is natural, that a love of learning is normal, and that real learning is passionate learning. A school curriculum that values questions above answers...creativity above fact regurgitation...individuality above conformity.. and excellence above standardized performance..... And we must reject all notions of 'reform' that serve up more of the same: more testing, more 'standards', more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy.
-- Tom Peters

#Real #Creativity #School

How do you humiliate and demean someone and then expect him or her to care about product quality.
-- Tom Peters

#Quality #Care #Humiliate

Life is too short for non-WOW projects.
-- Tom Peters

#Life Is Too Short #Wow #Projects

One size NEVER fits all. One size fits one. Period
-- Tom Peters

#Size #Fit #Periods

What gets measured gets done.
-- Tom Peters

#Done

Have you set high standards in the past that make it clear what level of performance you demand?
-- Tom Peters

#Past #High Standards #Levels

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.
-- Tom Peters

#Art #Creativity #Passion

The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to 'tidy up' the mess, as opposed to understanding it's a 'day one' issue and part of everything.
-- Tom Peters

#Mistake #Issues #Design

Gandhi and Mandela and Churchill and JFK and Reagan and Thatcher and Sarkozy and Franklin and Washington set the tone to an incredible degree-their "personal style" was their "brand." ("It" starts with personal style of the tip-top leadership team. Sorry to be politically insensitive, but who would give a hoot about Tibet if it weren't for the look and style of the Dalai Lama?) Boss at any level: You're either on the "it" boat-or not.
-- Tom Peters

#Leadership #Sorry #Team