Product Description

Shake up your business thinking and make metaphorical origami of the accepted coorporate rule book. The future of business strarts here and now, laid out in glorious technicolour for all to read - so get ahead of the game and en route to innovation excellence with the world's most influential management guru, Tom Peters.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #485671 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
Indeed, Peters is the Billy Connolly of business. If your head doesn't spin round, become engulfed in flames and blow off your neck at high speed then you may well become the most motivated person in British history. Don't read it during a bank holiday. EN Magazine (The Magazine for Entrepreneurs)

About the Author
Tom Peters, 'buinesses best friend and worst nightmare' has been hailed as the uber guru of management by The Economist. His first book, 'In Search of Excellence' changed the way we did business forever. As well as writing Tom Peters manages the tompeterscompany!, a global training and consulting organisation that advises major clients including Asda, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Virgin Direct. He lives in the US.

Customer Reviews

Chaotic Compilation of Crusading Corporate Canon
If you have never read any of Tom Peters' books, you can skip the earlier ones and just read this one.

If you have read all of his earlier books, you can skip this one.

If you have read some of the earlier books, you can just read the topics in this one that are skipped in the earlier ones you have read. I suspect that that won't be too many.

Tom Peters is our most passionate management guru. He explodes all over his audience in anger, annoyance, passion and rapture. It's a marvelous show . . . and I highly recommend it.

He's also open to new ideas. This book, for instance, gratefully acknowledges contributions from dozens of other authors, CEOs, business thinkers and members of his own family (especially his wife). If you don't read very many business books, I was impressed to see that he cited a very high percentage of the best management books of the last dozen years or so. So if you have read very little on the subject, this book will serve you well.

As intriguing as the book is, it has important limitations. First, the format can be all but impossible to read (especially where text is printed over grey images) in places.

Second, he has blind spots in several areas that make the advice come out somewhat jaundiced. For instance, he hates anything to do with eliminating errors (such as the quality movement and Six Sigma) as though using those methods destroy any chance for innovation in any other area. In my research, I've seen innovation in every dimension of a company exist just fine side-by-side with efforts to eliminate errors and improve quality, whenever different people worked on different aspects of innovation from those working on quality improvement and error elimination.

He correctly points out that women are underestimated and under-served as customers. But in big companies, men still run the show (except at a few bellwethers like Avon Products) . . . and he just ignores the question of how to market to influential men as though it were irrelevant.

Finally, he's been traveling in the exalted circles of the biggest, most influential people and companies for so long that he doesn't have any new examples from the top up-and-coming performers or any new guidance for start-ups. So he's unfortunately dated in his illustrations. That makes the message one that seems to be tame . . . because it is aimed at those who can feel safe in ignoring it as they sit in their palatial suites in the largest companies.

The story is amazingly redundant in the book. There's a microcosm of virtually the whole message of the book in almost every chapter. The repetition is primarily helpful for persuasiveness. It is annoying though if you already get the message.

You can boil the book down to this message: Innovation rules. You need to get off-beat people to work on innovation to have a chance. Everyone's job is innovation. Passion drives successful innovation by creating beautiful, simple systems and wonderful emotional experiences for customers and employees. The leader's job is to create an environment for such innovation. Be ready to fall down, pick yourself up, and try again. Focus your innovation as much as possible on those areas where few others are looking.

Sometimes Dazzling But Seldom Substantial
In recent years, Peters has become a passionate provocateur among business writers, heavily relying on flamboyant punctuation to EXPRESS HIS IDEAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sometimes his confrontational approach is effective, sometimes not. As an admirer of the writing styles of Thoreau, Emerson, Orwell, and E.B. White, I am uncomfortable with Peters' writing style but perhaps that's his intent: to stimulate his reader to challenge what Jim O'Toole calls "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." In this volume, Peters explores a wide range of subjects and addresses a number of issues which are certainly worthy of careful consideration. For example, the ever-increasing purchasing power of women, the deficiencies of public school education, the as-yet unfulfilled potentialities of e-business, the often decisive impact of effective branding, and the ever-increasing importance of innovative thinking throughout all levels of any organization. He organizes his material within a volume which is visually unorthodox. Some may be turned off by that. I am not. The page layouts and graphics seem compatible with Peters' apparent objective to challenge, stimulate, etc. My distaste for Peters's writing style aside, I found this volume often lacking in terms of cohesion and transition of key concepts. There is no shortage of ideas but many (too many) are underdeveloped. Some of his opinions about the significance of 9/11 seem insensitive to the human tragedies caused by the events on that day. Two final points: If a book provides at least a few insights which are valuable to my own labors in the vineyards of free enterprise, it is (for me) worth reading. Peters's most recent book does. However, I would have preferred more substance and less style. One man's opinion.

This is too much like hard work
Tom Peters comes with an impressive pedigree - but this attempt is flawed. The book deliberately sets out to be provocative by using frequent, radical changes in font, text size and colour.

And this is key to Peter's point - we have to radically change our thinking to re-invent our businesses. There is some good content here - but unfortunately nothing really new. Peters (and others) have been here before.

However, I found it far too much like hard work. Unusually for me I gave up about 75% of the way through - I could not get through the glaring presentation to take in the message.