A Quote by Tom Peters
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.
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If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.
You look at these past predictions like there's only a market in the world for five computers [as allegedly said by IBM founder Thomas Watson] and you realize it's not a good idea to predict too far into the future.
How do you achieve excellence?...Stop doing non-excellent stuff!
There is an ideal of excellence for any particular craft or occupation; similarly there must be an excellent that we can achieve as human beings. That is, we can live our lives as a whole in such a way that they can be judged not just as excellent in this respect or in that occupation, but as excellent, period. Only when we develop our truly human capacities sufficiently to achieve this human excellent will we have lives blessed with happiness.
Excellence is everything today, and most people aren't excellent. If you're not excellent - like truly excellent at what you do - you're toast.
There are plenty of things I wish I'd known when I decided to quit my position at IBM and work on the idea that later became TaskRabbit. Maybe that's why one of the things I cherish most about being a founder and CEO is the opportunity to offer advice to new entrepreneurs.
Excellence" is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice.
We do not act "rightly" because we are "excellent",
in fact we achieve "excellence" by acting "rightly".
IBM doesn't want its people to get frustrated and restless because it has them reaching for carrots they can't quit
It's a failure only if you don't get anything out of it, Thomas Edison said he knew 999 ways that a light bulb did not work; yet we have lights today.
Excellence Matters. Excellent people. Excellent vision. Excellent marketing. Excellent strategies.
I think one thing we went through was common to a lot of people: You work your whole life to achieve something, then you achieve it and find out that you still have good days and bad days. So you start thinking, 'Is that all there is?' After a while you calm down and get back to work.
I say seduce her, seduce her tonight. Break the door down if you have to. Tell her all those things you said to me about her. You will love her more tomorrow than today and how you want to die with her hand in yours–which is an excellent line, by the way, that I fully intend to borrow when the time comes.
I think what IBM is excellent at is using their sales and marketing infrastructure to convince people who have asymmetrically less knowledge to pay for something.
Excellence is THE trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It, etc.
You can try your passion for a while and see if it works and if it doesn't, at least you tried. I think that's why I quit my job and went back to acting. I said this is what I'm going to dedicate my life to doing because I didn't want to look up and say, "Man I wish I would have been an actor. I wish I would have tried."
If joining IBM was commitment, not employment, and the company engaged in something more than business, it had a right to demand of its men unconditional loyalty, Watson believed.
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