Tom Peters
Tom Peters is
deservedly called the "father of branding".
Tom Peters is considered one of the most sought after and expensive
management lecturers in the world.
He wrote the book "In
Search of Excellence" with Robert Waterman in 1982 which has been called
"the world's best selling business book". He later wrote "Thriving On
Chaos" which was also very successful. Before he became a McKinsey
consultant in 1974, he worked in the Pentagon for two years where he
became fascinated by complex organizations.
He gained a masters degree in civil engineering at Cornell University
and then served in Vietnam. Later he took an MBA at Stanford and worked
at the Washington Office of Management and Budget. He is founder of the
Tom Peters Group which has formed a substantial business in videos,
cassettes, a TV series, personal appearances and consultancy work.
Life and Career of Tom Peters
Tom Peters was born in
Baltimore, Maryland. He went to Severn School for High School and
attended Cornell University, receiving a bachelor's degree in civil
engineering in 1965, and a master's degree in 1966. He then studied
business at Stanford Business School, receiving an M.B.A. and Ph.D.. In
2004, he also received an honorary doctorate from the State University
of Management in Moscow.
From 1966 to 1970, he served in the United States Navy, making two
deployments to Vietnam as a Navy Seabee, then later working in the
Pentagon. From 1973 to 1974, he worked in the White House as a senior
drug-abuse advisor, during the Nixon administration. Peters has
acknowledged the influence of military strategist Colonel John Boyd on
his later writing.
From 1974 to 1981, Peters worked as a management consultant at McKinsey
& Company, becoming a partner and Organization Effectiveness practice
leader in 1979, and then in 1981, he went solo and became an independent
consultant.
In 1990, Tom Peters was honoured by the British Department of Trade and
Industry (DTI) as one of the world's Quality Gurus.
Academic Studies of Tom Peters
In Search of Excellence
was published in 1982, and became a bestseller, gaining national
exposure when a series of television specials based on the book and
hosted by Peters appeared on PBS. The primary idea espoused was that of
solving business problems with as little business process overhead as
possible, and empowering decision-makers at multiple levels of a company.
In his more recent books, Tom Peters has encouraged personal
responsibility in response to the "New Economy". Quoting from his book,
Talent: Develop It, Sell It, Be It: "The harsh news: This Is Not
Optional. The microchip will colonize all rote activities. And we will
have to scramble to reinvent ourselves - as we did when we came off the
farm and went into the factory, and then as we were ejected from the
factory and delivered to the white-collar towers. The exciting news (as
I see it anyway): This Is Not Optional. The reinvented you and the
reinvented me will have no choice but to scramble and add value in some
meaningful way."
In the December 2001 issue of Fast Company, Peters was quoted admitting
that he had falsified the underlying data for In Search of Excellence.
In an odd turn of events, however, he later insisted that this was
untrue, and that he was the victim of an "aggressive headline."
Tom Peters's latest book is The Little Big Things, scheduled for release
in February 2010.
Tom Peters currently lives in West Tinmouth, Vermont with his wife Susan
Sargent, and continues to write and speak about personal and business
empowerment and problem solving methodologies. His namesake company is
based in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
Works of Tom Peters
* 1982 - In Search of
Excellence (co-written with Robert H. Waterman, Jr.)
* 1985 - A Passion for Excellence (co-written with Nancy Austin)
* 1987 - Thriving on Chaos
* 1992 - Liberation Management
* 1993 - The Tom Peters Seminar: Crazy Times Call for Crazy
Organizations
* 1994 - The Pursuit of WOW!
* 1997 - The Circle of Innovation: You Can't Shrink Your Way to
Greatness
* 1999 - The Brand You50, The Project50 and The Professional Service
Firm50 (Reinventing Work Series)
* 2003 - Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age
* 2005 - Talent
* 2005 - Leadership
* 2005 - Design
* 2005 - Trends (co-written with Martha Barletta)
Tom Peters' Biography
Without much doubt,
Peter Drucker and Tom Peters have shaped
the idea of modern management more than any others over the last six
decades. Peter Drucker is said to have "invented"
management as a discipline worthy of study�in particular, he gave
management of large firms the essential tools to deal with their post-World
War II enormity, complexity, and growing global reach. Tom Peters, in
turn, led the way in preparing management for the current era of
staggering change, starting in the mid-1970s.
The likes of Fortune, the Economist, the
New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times have said Tom is the "uber-guru" of
management and inventor of the enormous "management guru industry," that
"in no small part, what American corporations have become is what Peters
has encouraged them to be," that Tom is "the father of the post-modern
corporation," and that "we live in a Tom Peters world."
In particular, in 1982, with the
publication of In Search of Excellence, Tom and Bob Waterman helped
American firms deal with a crushing competitive challenge to their
primacy by getting them away from strategies based on just the numbers,
and re-focused on the basic drivers of all successful businesses
throughout time: people, customers, values-"culture" ("the way we do
things around here"), action-execution, a perpetual self-renewing
entrepreneurial spirit.
As "obvious" as these ideas are, they were,
are, and always will be the bedrock and differentiator of excellent
enterprise�and subject to constant and remarkably rapid slippage if left
untended for even a moment. As a result, Tom in 2008 still unabashedly
hammers and hammers and hammers again on these always fresh ideas. If
anything, he is more adamant than ever, in a "flat world," that the "eternal
basics" must be kept front and center�must be any leader's abiding
obsession. On the
other hand, with the passage of time, and through 15 books in total, Tom
has added many a new arrow to his quiver�and cause to his portfolio of
rants. For example, he became the first and loudest "guru voice" on the
primacy of design as an extraordinary competitive advantage. He became
the loudest, and perhaps earliest, voice on the need for employees to
re-shape their careers around the idea of "brand you" (every person a "businessperson")
if they are to add useful value to their firms and survive the perils of
cutthroat global competition in the labor market. He became the first
and loudest "guru voice" on the enormous opportunities in creating
products and services to cater to the staggeringly large and absurdly
underserved women's market�and the attendant need for women in senior
management to support this thrust. He became one of the earliest to
noisily point out the equally large and equally ignored boomer+ market
that will dominate global business's attention for at least the next 25
years. More recently, he has aimed his analytic and oral guns at our
largest industry, healthcare; rather than the intricacies of finance,
his thrust is the equally or even more important issues surrounding
operational excellence�aggressive use of information technology where
shortfalls are embarrassing, an abiding emphasis on our very
questionable patient safety record, so-called evidence-based medicine,
long overdue "patient-centric" care, and the ridiculously under-attended
issues surrounding prevention and wellness.
Tom's presentations are marked not only by
his stunning breadth of interests and skill at tailoring his message to
suit the needs of widely diverse audiences, but in particular by the
contagious passion and energy he brings to his topic. A 20-year-old
student in Korea, in May 2008, asked before a crowd of 3,000 gathered in
Seoul to discuss design primacy as Korea's national strategy, "Where do
you get your mind-bending passion and energy?"�an amazing tribute to his
sustaining vitality and engagement.
Perhaps the Bloomsbury Press book, Movers
and Shakers: The 100 Most Influential Figures in Modern Business, summed
Tom's work up best. Reviewing the historical contributions of the giants
of management thinking and practice, from Machiavelli and J.P. Morgan to
Tom and Jack Welch, they said:
| "Tom Peters has probably
done more than anyone else to shift the debate on management
from the confines of boardrooms, academia, and consultancies to
a broader, worldwide audience, where it has become the staple
diet of the media and managers alike. Peter Drucker has written
more and his ideas have withstood a longer test of time, but it
is Peters�as consultant, writer, columnist, seminar lecturer,
and stage performer�whose energy, style, influence, and ideas
have shaped new management thinking." |
References
http://www.tompeters.com/toms_world/press_kit/who_is.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Peters
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/tom-peters |
