Tom Peters, Robert H. Waterman Jr.
In Search of Excellence.
Harper Collins. 1982
rating : 3 : worth reading
rating : 3 : worth reading
rating : 3 : worth reading
rating : 2.5 : great stuff
rating : 3 : worth reading
Peters wants to give you the words, the tools, to survive in the tumultuous nineties. A dozen years ago his groundbreaking book In Search of Excellence changed the way business does business. Now it’s time to take the next leap—into the NAFTA, GATT, a1l-the-world’s-a-cyberstage era. Getting to a place called excellence is no longer the idea. You’ve got to take that leap, then leap again—catapult their imaginations, blow their mindsets, knock their Nikes off. In a word, wow! them. It’s the wow!ers who will win in this brazen new world.
Organized into more than 200 thought and action provoking elements—from the importance of clean trucks and bathrooms to conversations with entrepreneurs creating markets where none existed before—The Pursuit of Wow! is a practical guide to impractical times, containing the tactics and strategies you’ll need to get on the bullet train.
This brash, digestible book might drive you up the wall, it might drive you to distraction, but it might also drive you (and your business) to new heights 1n the twenty-first century global marketplace.
rating : 3.5 : worth reading
review : 14 March 2000
Tom Peters talks and writes with great enthusiasm and passion for his subject. But unfortunately this book does not provide the "added value" the printed word can give over a lecture: detail and depth. Here that added value is mostly missing, because the book is structured as if it were a series of talks. So alternate pages are large, low information density "slides", with the remaining pages being the equivalent of talk notes (and the notes make copious use of h-y-p-h-e-n-s and CAPITALS and exclamation points!!!!, which doesn't exactly make them transparently easy to read). Sometimes you get to read the same thing three times within a double page -- once on the slide, once in the text, and once as a highlight. [The wondrous thing about books, with their potential for non-linear reading order, is that you can read the same thing three times even if it is printed only once.] So I was left feeling a bit short-changed.
Don't get me wrong: what is here is all good stuff. We've done business process re-engineering, we've done quality -- everything is now of the same high standard. Quality is now expected, now "ho hum", it doesn't differentiate you from your competitors. So Tom Peters is bubbling about the new differentiators -- design, service, innovation -- and that innovation requires risk, wackiness, diversity. But it is only bubbling: I kept wanting more examples, more detail, more substance. Like the earlier books had.
