In Search of Excellence, written with Robert Waterman, was the book that turned management writing into a mass market. It also produced the McKinsey 7S framework.
His long argument since is that strategy is over-valued and execution, and specifically how an organisation treats its people, is under-valued. He is loud about it, and he has been consistent for four decades.
Several of the excellent companies in the original book subsequently struggled badly, and Peters has discussed the book's methodology critically himself. It is a useful case study in survivorship bias, and he is unusually willing to say so.
The first of the excellence attributes and the one that transfers best to a small business: try it, small, now, rather than analysing it for a quarter.
His central claim. Most competitors have access to the same information and the same ideas; the difference is who actually does the unglamorous thing consistently.
The people closest to the customer know most about the business and are asked least. It is a cheap, permanently available source of improvement.
These links go to their own work. We summarise and point — we do not republish it.
Owners who have a plan and no traction, and anyone who suspects their strategy problem is really an execution problem.
The style is exclamatory and repetitive. The evidence base for the original book does not hold up, and he says so.
