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Tom Peters III | |
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| Born | November 7, 1942 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Cornell University (BS, MS) Stanford University (MBA, Ph.D.) |
| Occupation(s) | Author, consultant |
| Website | tompeters |
Thomas J. Peters (born November 7, 1942) is an American writer on business management practices, best known for In Search of Excellence (co-authored with Robert H. Waterman Jr.)
Peters was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He went to Severn School, a private, preparatory high school, graduating in 1960. [1] Peters then attended Cornell University, receiving a bachelor's degree in civil engineering in 1964, [2] and a master's degree in 1966.
He returned to academia in 1970 to study business at Stanford Business School [3] [ self-published source ] receiving an MBA followed by a PhD in Organizational Behavior in 1977. The title of his dissertation was "Patterns of Winning and Losing: Effects on Approach and Avoidance by Friends and Enemies." [4] Karl Weick credited Peters' dissertation with giving him the idea for his 1984 article: [5] "Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems." [6]
While at Stanford, Peters was influenced by Jim G. March, Herbert Simon (both at Stanford), and Karl Weick (at the University of Michigan). Later, he noted that he was influenced by Douglas McGregor and Einar Thorsrud. [7]
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 acknowledged both the influence of military strategist Colonel John Boyd and OODA loops in 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. In 1981, he left McKinsey to become an independent consultant.
In 1990, Peters was referred to in a British Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) publication as one of the world's Quality Gurus.
In 1995, the New York Times referred to Peters as one of the top three business experts in the highest demand as a speaker along with Daniel Burrus and Roger Blackwell. [8]
By 2000, Peters was noted for his ever-increasingly aggressive and sometimes "crackpot" demeanor while at the same time his target audiences had changed towards the considerably lower ranks of SMI management. [9]
In 2017, "Thinkers50" awarded Peters with its Lifetime Achievement Award for his paving the way for the "thought leadership" and business book industries. [10]
The publication of the popular business book In Search of Excellence in 1982 marked a turning point in Peters' career.
Peters states that directly after graduating with a PhD from Stanford in 1977, and returning to McKinsey, the new managing director, Ron Daniel, handed him a "fascinating assignment." [3] [ self-published source ] Motivated by the new ideas coming from Bruce Henderson's Boston Consulting Group, Daniel noted that businesses often failed to effectively implement new strategies, so Peters "was asked to look at 'organization effectiveness' and 'implementation issues' in an inconsequential offshoot project nested in McKinsey's rather offbeat San Francisco office." [3] [ self-published source ]
In Search of Excellence became a bestseller, gaining exposure in the United States at a national level when a series of television specials based on the book and hosted by Peters appeared on PBS. The primary ideas espoused solving business problems with as little business-process overhead as possible, and empowering decision-makers at multiple levels of a company.
The December 2001 issue of Fast Company quoted Peters admitting that he and Waterman had falsified the underlying data for In Search of Excellence. He is quoted as saying, "This is pretty small beer, but for what it's worth, okay, I confess: We faked the data. A lot of people suggested it at the time." [11] He later insisted that this was untrue and that he was the victim of an "aggressive headline." [12]
In 1987 Peters published Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution. [13]
In later books, Peters has encouraged personal responsibility in response to the "New Economy."
More recent books are The Excellence Dividend, released in April 2018, [14] and Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism, released in 2021. [15]
Peters currently lives in South Dartmouth, MA with his wife Susan Sargent, and continues to write and speak about personal and business empowerment and problem-solving methodologies.
His namesake company "Tom Peters Company" [16] is based in Essex, UK.
Alfonsus (Fons) Trompenaars is a Dutch organizational theorist, management consultant, and author in the field of cross-cultural communication. known for the development of Trompenaars' model of national culture differences.
McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm founded in 1926 by University of Chicago professor James O. McKinsey, that offers professional services to corporations, governments, and other organizations. McKinsey is the oldest and largest of the "Big Three" management consultancies (MBB). The firm mainly focuses on the finances and operations of their clients.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't is a management book by Jim C. Collins that describes how companies transition from being good companies to great companies, and how most companies fail to make the transition. The book was a bestseller, selling four million copies and going far beyond the traditional audience of business books. The book was published on October 16, 2001.
In Search of Excellence is a book written by Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. First published in 1982, it sold three million copies in its first four years, and was the most widely held monograph in the United States from 1989 to 2006. The book explores the art and science of management used by several companies in the 1980s.
Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad was an Indian-American entrepreneur and author. He was the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy at the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business.
Robert H. Waterman Jr. was a non-fiction author and expert on business management practices.
Warren Gamaliel Bennis was an American scholar, organizational consultant and author, widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of Leadership studies. Bennis was University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Founding Chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California.
James C. "Jim" Collins is an American researcher, author, speaker and consultant focused on the subject of business management and company sustainability and growth.
Richard A. D'Aveni is an American academic, thought leader, business consultant, bestselling author and the Bakala Professor of Strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He is best known for creating a new paradigm in business strategy and coining the term “hypercompetition” which led Fortune to liken him to a modern version of Sun Tzu.
Karl Moore is an associate professor at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Strategy and Organization at the Desautels Faculty of Management and the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill's Faculty of Medicine, however, he is not a medical professional, he does leadership teaching and coaching. Moore was previously on the faculty of Templeton College at Oxford University for five years, where he remains an Associate Fellow. Before joining academia, he worked 12 years in sales and marketing management positions with IBM, Bull and Hitachi. Other schools he has taught at on MBA or executive programs include: Harvard Business School, Stanford, Duke, USC, Oxford, Cambridge, LBS, INSEAD, IMD, Skolkovo, Renmin, IIM Bangalore, NUS, and Keio University.
Rita Gunther McGrath is an American strategic management scholar and professor of management at the Columbia Business School. She is known for her work on strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the development of discovery-driven planning.
Subir Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi-American author of 15 books and noted for his work in quality and management. He is currently the chairman and CEO of ASI Consulting Group, LLC, in Bingham Farms, Michigan.
The McKinsey 7S Framework is a management model developed by business consultants Robert H. Waterman, Jr. and Tom Peters in the 1980s. This was a strategic vision for groups, to include businesses, business units, and teams. The 7 S's are structure, strategy, systems, skills, style, staff and shared values.
The management by wandering around (MBWA), also management by walking around, refers to a style of business management which involves managers wandering around, in an unstructured manner, through the workplace(s), at random, to check with employees, equipment, or on the status of ongoing work. The emphasis is on the word wandering as an unplanned movement within a workplace, rather than a plan where employees expect a visit from managers at more systematic, pre-approved or scheduled times.
Stuart Crainer is an author, editor, adviser and entrepreneur.
Des Dearlove is a British business journalist and management theorist, known for his work on the history and state-of-the-art of management theory.
Amy C. Edmondson is an American scholar of leadership, teaming, and organizational learning. She is currently Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. Edmondson is the author of seven books and more than 75 articles and case studies. She is best known for her pioneering work on psychological safety, which has helped spawn a large body of academic research in management, healthcare and education over the past 15 years. Her books include "Right Kind of Wrong, the Science of Failing Well", “The Fearless Organization,Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth” (2018)) and “Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy” (2012).
Soren Marcus Kaplan is an author, consultant, and speaker on the subject of innovation and innovation culture in organizations. He is an Affiliate at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, founder of the consulting firm InnovationPoint, co-founder of the software company Praxie.com, and is a columnist for the Innovate column of Inc. Magazine.
Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It is a non-fiction book by Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik, published in March 2018 by Penguin Press. It explores how complexity causes problems in modern systems and how individuals, organizations, and societies can prevent or mitigate the resulting failures. Meltdown was named a best book of the year by the Financial Times and won Canada's National Business Book Award in 2019.
Martin Roll is a Danish author, brand strategist and management consultant. Roll appears regularly in global television and print media. He holds an MBA from INSEAD where he is a Distinguished Fellow and an Entrepreneur in Residence. Roll's first book, Asian Brand Strategy, was named one of the "Best Business Books: Marketing" in 2006 by Strategy+Business magazine. He is the founder CEO of Martin Roll Company, an advisory firm based in Singapore. He advises Fortune 500 companies, Asian firms, family-owned businesses and also served as a senior advisor to McKinsey & Company.
If you know one thing about Tom Peters, you know about his first book, and if you know two things, the second is that he hasn't written a book as good as that since, and if you know three things, the third is that sometime in the 18 years since that first precious book, he's gone bonkers.
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