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Tom Peters Quotes

Tom Peters

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Ultimately, I think that the growth and sustainability of the e-book movement depends on authors and end-users (readers).
- Tom Peters
Collection: Book
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I would not be surprised to see interesting new forms of expression and literary genres develop as the e-book movement matures.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Book
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When it comes to e-book playback devices and software, I have always thought that the emphasis on ergonomic concerns as a tipping point for the end-user population was misplaced.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Book
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I wrote the book based on a blog that I keep. I also tweet. I don't think that for an incredibly old fart I'm totally behind the power curve. I really believe that the essentials of human relationships remain the same.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Book
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Authors and publishers want fair compensation and a means of protecting content through digital rights management. Vendors and technology companies want new markets for e-book reading devices and other hardware. End-users most of all want a wide range and generous amount of high-quality content for free or at reasonable costs. Like end-users, libraries want quality, quantity, economy, and variety as well as flexible business models.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Reading
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The populations of most cities around the world continue to grow. The reasonspeople congregate in cities are various and complex, and the dawn of the digital age has not put much of adamper on the human urge to congregate.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Cities
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The selfish leader will attempt to lead others for their own gain and for the detriment of others.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Selfish
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A good collection is more than just the sum of its parts.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Collections
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One size NEVER fits all. One size fits one. Period
- Tom Peters
Collection: Size
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Digital content and electronic networks have changed the basic environmental conditionsin which documents are created, distributed, and used.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Environmental
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To grasp organizational life as it is, read novels (!) .... It is my fervent belief that we will never design rational processes that "overcome" such irregularities-don't bother telling that to a consultant. Hence, we should embrace the real, nonrational, nonlinear world with vigor and glee-and develop enterprise and career strategies accordingly.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Success
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The world has not just "turned upside down". It is turning in every which way at an accelerating pace.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Pace
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I am confident that for the foreseeable future (barring some catastrophic event affecting economic, energy, electrical, and communications systems), many subpopulations that use information intensively (e.g., students, academics, library patrons, white collar workers) will be using some sort of portal information appliance.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Communication
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MP3 players and flash memory devices are good for data storage and playback of music and digital talking books, but they offer little or nothing in the way of visual presentation of information and communication.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Memories
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Digital ink technology holds substantial promise in terms of legibility, portability, and power consumption, but I am less confident about the communication aspect.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Communication
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"Old" is definitely not cool in America. Never has been.
- Tom Peters
Collection: America
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As project chief you are creating a narrative, a story, a good yarn. If you look at the process-journey that way, you and your gang will ... dramatically up the odds of a WOW outcome!
- Tom Peters
Collection: Journey
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We must reject all notions of 'reform' that serve up more of the same: more testing, more 'standards', more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Teaching
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Life is too short for non-WOW projects.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Life Is Too Short
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Leaders do stuff that matters.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Leader
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Without exception, the dominance and coherence of culture proved to be an essential quality of the excellent companies.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Quality
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The drive for control, or the perception thereof, is truly the strongest force in human nature.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Perception
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The common wisdom is that ... managers have to learn to motivate people. Nonsense. Employees bring their own motivation.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Motivation
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Forget loyalty. Or at least loyalty to one's corporation. Try loyalty to your Rolodex-your network-instead.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Loyalty
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I'm about as far from being a flag-waver - you won't find any American flag pins in my drawer - as someone can be.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Flags
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The Chinese are quite entrepreneurial. Remember when Lenovo bought IBM's PC division. It was said that China didn't need a brand name, China didn't need to buy Lenovo to get into the PC business, I remember reading a one-liner somewhere which struck me as quite possibly true, it said the one thing that the Chinese had not been able to copy or figure out was the way, in terms of systems, that Americans - it probably would be true for Europeans as well - that Americans install and live by their management systems, while China is still quite half-assed. Perhaps that is a true statement.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Reading
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Organize as much as possible around teams, to achieve enhanced focus, task orientation, innovativeness, and individual commitment.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Team
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Rewards should go to teams as a whole.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Teamwork
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Steve Jobs is perhaps the most competitive human being I have ever met in my life, and yet I would argue one of the most artistic human beings I have ever met in my life. You can trash the movies all you want, but they do have an artistic component. And yet brutal competition knows no peers when it comes to Hollywood.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Jobs
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The 10 or 12 artists I have known really well all my life are at least as competitive as professional athletes. They may express it in slightly different terms, but you look at the Jackson Pollocks et al., and they are as interested in wall space in the galleries as Joe Montana is in the percentage of completed passes. So the notion that symphonic conducting, or stage play, or pure art, is not a competitive business is real bullshit.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Art
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In McKinsey's world, all of life is one of two things: strategy or organization.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Organization
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It boils down to studenthood-in-perpetuity / curiosity-in-perpetuity / applied fanatic restlessness. That is, a belief that life is ONE BIG LEARNING EXPERIENCE. Something mysterious happens to a curious, fully engaged mind - and it happens as often as not, subconsciously. Strange little sparks are set off, connections made, insights triggered. The results: an exponentially increased ability to tune up / reinvent / WOW-ize today's project at work.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Education
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Had Twitter been invented earlier, my books would have been shorter.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Book
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Quality involves living the message of the possibility of perfection and infinite improvement, living it day in and day out, decade by decade.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Perfection
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Who, precisely, are your Dreamers? Are their Dreams in Technicolor? Do you allow their most Outrageous Dreams to be seen in public?
- Tom Peters
Collection: Dream
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Leaders trust their guts. "Intuition" is one of those good words that has gotten a bad rap. For some reason, intuition has become a "soft" notion. Garbage! Intuition is the new physics. It's an Einsteinian, seven-sense, practical way to make tough decisions. Bottom line, circa 2001 to 2010: The crazier the times are, the more important it is for leaders to develop and to trust their intuition.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Rap
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The hyperfast-moving, wired-up, reengineered, quality-obsessed organization will succeed or fail on the strength of the trust that its managers place in the folks working on the front line.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Moving
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I am my clients. I am defined by who I do business with.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Clients
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Don't let the vision be shot through with holes, but be damn sure some of your best and brightest are shooting at it -- with bazookas as well as sniper's rifles.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Vision
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Be guided by the axiom: There are no limits to the ability to contribute on the part of a properly selected, well-trained, appropriately supported, and, above all, committed person.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Limits
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Confidence means non-paralysis, a willingness to act, and act decisively, to start new things and cut failing ventures off.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Motivational
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Some people have argued that listening to a work of literature does not really promote literacy in the same way that reading does. Having tried this for several months, however, I can report from the trenches that, for me, immersive listening is as intellectually challenging, stimulating, and rewarding as immersive reading.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Reading
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The delivery and presentation media are important, and each format has its advantages and disadvantages, but ultimately I just want to read what I want to read, when and where I want.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Media
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If there is a single tragic flaw that mars our biggest enterprises, it is conservatism - the failure to fail, and fail big, in an era of unprecedented volatility and ambiguity.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Mars
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For me, reading is reading.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Reading
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People of all demographic categories and geographic regions will access a good digital library.
- Tom Peters
Collection: People
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Now that gigabytes of accessible, malleable information can be carried in one's pocket, we probably will start to see some widespread shifts and trends in how and where people interact with digital documents.
- Tom Peters
Collection: People
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I don't believe in holy writ. Buy fifty books or twenty-five books, take three weeks off, read them and make up your own theory. The fact that you end up literally burning twenty-two out of twenty-five books is beside the point.
- Tom Peters
Collection: Believe

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