Given the state of our world today Tom sets an even higher bar and will show how excellence in leadership is achieved by an obsessive focus on the growth of those you are leading. So what did we find? If you bought a portfolio of these companies and held them for two decades, you would have beaten the index by 1.7%. Not bad! GTG is in the lead at a 2.6% outperformance, followed by BTL at 1.6% and ISOE at 1.5%. The cool professional service firm is just that: cool talent, a portfolio of cool projects, cool clients. Period. Its only asset—literally—is brains. Its only product is projects. Its only aim is truly memorable client service. This is what we call the WOW Project. It's obvious ... in retrospect. The common denominator-bottom line for both the professional service firm/PSF and the individual/Brand You ... is the project. And for the cool individual in the cool professional service firm there is only one answer: the cool project. Funny thing ... the work itself always seems missing in most discussions of "management." (Maybe it's because we've expended so little energy studying white collar work.)

Getting Weird Design The Heart Boss- In Work Talent Branding

More than just a how-to book for the 21st Century, Re-imagine! is a call to arms—a passionate wake-up call for the business world, educators, and society as a whole. Focusing on how the business climate has changed, this inspirational book outlines how the new world of business works, explores radical ways of overcoming outdated, traditional company values, and embraces an aggressive strategy that empowers talent and brand-driven organizations where everyone has a voice.

The aim, in short: Cool People working on Cool Projects with Cool Clients. The aim redux: A COOL Finance—Purchasing, IS, HR—Department. Why not? It’s this final point that I find most interesting. In the zeitgeist of the day, they were truly incredible organizations with enviable performance, widely admired leaders, and strong cultures. So looking at what happened to them makes for a great natural experiment where the company’s quality is a given – the variable is the context in which it operated. Tom teamed up with publisher Dorling Kindersley to present a departure in business books. Visually exciting and compelling to read, Re-imagine! presents reasons why COOL BUSINESS is NOT OPTIONAL. Women are where it's at! And Boomers and Geezers are where damn near ALL the loot is! How you respond to emerging trends and exploit their potential is key to the success of your organization. Create a strategic vision for the future with revolutionary new ideas from Tom Peters and Martha Barletta. Discover how marketing to women is "the biggest trend in the world." Find out how you can target the aging population. Think about making that strategic realignment. So, did being great matter to these companies’ ultimate fate? In my view, it was good to be great, but the external environments in which these companies found themselves mattered far more. If you look at the stars versus the failures, the biggest dividing line seems to be their position in relation to a megatrend—either a good one or a bad one. Yes, it takes skill to ride a megatrend— Wal-Mart had to manage its meteoric rise from #259 on the Forbes 500 to #1—but all these companies were skilled, and on the whole that didn’t seem to matter as much.

What happened to the world’s “greatest” companies?

Published in 1994, The Pursuit of WOW! was served up as "a practical guide to impractical times." It's built on 210 numbered observations, all with a common bond of stepping out and standing out from the growing crowd of look-alikes. Along with the best of his columns, Peters includes questions and rebuttals that come from readers and listeners, as well as his own candid responses. Tom writes that The Pursuit of WOW! is "a clarion call for more personal and organizational spiciness in a world that will tolerate nothing less." Great companies were more likely to do really badly than really well. Their odds of outperforming the market were 52-48, hardly better than a coin toss. But there are more big losers than big winners on the lists. Just eight companies outperformed the index by more than 5%, while twice that number underperformed by the same percentage. Given the difficulty of beating the market, it’s no surprise that the biggest group is in the middle band of +/-2%. Motorola and Sony struggled to adapt to the Apple era, while Pitney Bowes (postage) and Kodak (film) were built on and failed to pivot from declining technologies. The emergence of global manufacturing also seemed to catch former greats such as Dana and Raychem on the wrong side. While writing The Excellence Dividend, Tom called it by various names, all of which suggested that the book contains everything he's learned in his 35-plus years of writing and speaking on the best practices for businesses and their leaders. In those 35 years, he never stopped studying what's new and making his best predictions for what's to come next. This book focuses all Tom's knowledge on how to manage your business in this time of exponentially accelerating change. Not surprisingly, he has a great deal to say about how you treat your people, and that your focus should be on striving for Excellence.Published in 1992, almost 10 years to the day after In Search of Excellence, Liberation Management focuses largely on how the inflexible, hierarchical, bureaucratic, organizational structures of the past were being consigned to the shredder and replaced with semi-permanent networks of small, autonomous, project-oriented teams. While evolving the flexibility theme of Thriving on Chaos to deal with the accelerating pace of business change in the early '90s, Liberation Management shows the genesis of Tom's thinking on some of his most important concepts in 1999: Project work and the professional service firm as the model organization for the new economy, along with the self as brand.