Top 311 Quotes & Sayings by Tom Peters - Page 6

Quality involves living the message of the possibility of perfection and infinite improvement, living it day in and day out, decade by decade.

Organize as much as possible around teams, to achieve enhanced focus, task orientation, innovativeness, and individual commitment.

I wrote the book based on a blog that I keep. I also tweet. I don't think that for an incredibly old fart I'm totally behind the power curve. I really believe that the essentials of human relationships remain the same.

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.

I'm about as far from being a flag-waver - you won't find any American flag pins in my drawer - as someone can be.

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!

Had Twitter been invented earlier, my books would have been shorter.

The Chinese are quite entrepreneurial. Remember when Lenovo bought IBM's PC division. It was said that China didn't need a brand name, China didn't need to buy Lenovo to get into the PC business, I remember reading a one-liner somewhere which struck me as quite possibly true, it said the one thing that the Chinese had not been able to copy or figure out was the way, in terms of systems, that Americans - it probably would be true for Europeans as well - that Americans install and live by their management systems, while China is still quite half-assed. Perhaps that is a true statement.

Without exception, the dominance and coherence of culture proved to be an essential quality of the excellent companies.

It boils down to studenthood-in-perpetuity / curiosity-in-perpetuity / applied fanatic restlessness. That is, a belief that life is ONE BIG LEARNING EXPERIENCE. Something mysterious happens to a curious, fully engaged mind - and it happens as often as not, subconsciously. Strange little sparks are set off, connections made, insights triggered. The results: an exponentially increased ability to tune up / reinvent / WOW-ize today's project at work.

"Old" is de?nitely not cool in America. Never has been.