In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies

by Thomas J. Peters

First, people and organizations are not “rational” in the ways strategy, business, and organization are typically taught. It’s dangerous to try to force a simplistic and misguided rationality on the way we manage. You cannot just manage “by the numbers.” Don’t even think about it.

A bias for action. In its simplest terms, this says “get out there and try something.” Just as you don’t learn anything in science without experimenting, you don’t learn anything in business without trying, failing, and trying again.

Remember that profit is to business as breathing is to life. The top companies make meaning, not just money.

Install a simple and workable structure; people will figure out the rest.

He argues that man is driven by an essential “dualism”; he needs both to be a part of something and to stick out. He needs at one and the same time to be a conforming member of a winning team and to be a star in his own right.

“They find planning more interesting than getting out a salable product…. Planning is a welcome respite from operating problems.

“It is inherently easier to develop a negative argument than to advance a constructive one.”