Top 311 Quotes & Sayings by Tom Peters - Page 3

Start by identifying the qualities or characteristics that make you distinctive from your competitors - or your colleagues. What have you done lately - this week - to make yourself stand out? What would your colleagues or your customers say is your greatest and clearest strength? Your most noteworthy (as in, worthy of note) personal trait?

I used to be skeptical when educators and technologists predicted that we may be entering a new era of oral culture, in which audible information will be at least as important as visible information. Now that I have adopted into my own daily life a device that makes music and spoken-word files easy to access from anywhere, I have tempered my skepticism.

The difference between great and average is, mostly, having the imagination and zeal to re-create yourself daily.

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.

I don't want an epitaph on my gravestone that says, 'He would have pursued some big dreams in his life, but other people wouldn't let him.

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

Formula for success: Underpromise and overachieve.

The company's most urgent task is to learn to welcome, beg for, demand - innovation from everyone.

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

Do it, fix it, try it.

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.

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.

He who makes the quickest, coolest prototypes reigns!

The manager, in today's world, doesn't get paid to be a steward of resources, a favored term not so many years ago. He or she gets paid for one and only one thing: to make things better (incrementally and dramatically), to change things, to act - today.

I urge you to set a tough, quantitative target for adding "differentiators" as I call them, to every service you provide.

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

Integrity may be about little things as much or more than big ones.

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.

The 'value added' for most any company, tiny or enormous, comes from the Quality of Experience provided.

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

...high end does not necessarily equal high price. It's a matter of attitude.

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

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!

Hire attitude train skills.

Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.

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.

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.

Companies have got to learn to eat change for breakfast.

Success requires a persistent misreading of the odds.

Even a poor, out-of-datecollection reflects in its own way the values of the people who created it and the community it serves.

The race will go to the curious, the slightly mad, and those with an un-satiated passion for learning and dare-deviltry.

We are all Michaelangelos.

If future competitiveness depends on treating people as an important part of the institution, the least respectful thing I can imagine doing to a human being is asking him to urinate in a cup.

I still read quite a few printed books, but if something is available in digital format I do not print it before I read it.

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!

Don't settle for less than is possible.

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

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

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).

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.

Quite simply, no matter how hard you try, no matter how "open" you are, you'll end up surrounded by "yes people." It's hard not to believe people who are repeating your own ideas. Resist the temptation.

Perception is all there is. If the customer think he's right, he's right.

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

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

We cannot innovate without opening the door to havoc.

The widespread availability of information is the only basis for effective day-to-day problem solving, which abets continuous improvement programs.

To meet the demands of the fast-changing competitive scene, we must simply learn to love change as much as we have hated it in the past.

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.

Swipe from the best, then adapt.

Learning is a matter of intensity not elapsed time.

Winston Churchill said that appetite was the most important thing about education. Leadership guru Warren Bennis says he wants to be remembered as 'curious to the end.' David Ogilvy contends that the greatest ad copywriters are marked by an insatiable curiosity 'about every subject under the sun.'

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.

OPPORTUNITY is not "knocking." It is pounding on your door.

The day firing becomes easy is the day to fire yourself.

Execution Excellence! (Show up on time! Leave last!)

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?

It's relatively simple. If we're not getting more, better, faster than they are getting more, better, faster, then we're getting less, no better or more worse.

The little people will get even, which is one of a thousand reasons why they are not little people at all. If you're a jerk as a leader, you will be torpedoed. And usually it won't be by your vice presidents; it will be on the loading dock at 3am when no supervisors are around.

Train everyone lavishly. You can't overspend on training.

Hire disrespectful people.