There Are Several Lessons To Be Gained

Company leaders have been on the lookout for traditional business strategies in recent years. With the bestselling book In Search of Perfection, which he co-authored, Tom Peters has helped to accelerate this tendency (Haper & Row, 1982).

However, as the book points out, perfection is not synonymous with permanence, since many of the book''s fine examples have "sunk."

The book is based on a McKinsey analysis of 75 high-ranking organizations, as well as in-depth interviews and a 25-year assessment of the literature. To achieve perfection, any firm must achieve high growth and economic success over a lengthy period of time. Many of the great names in this renowned book went wrong not long after it was released, including corporations like Digital Equipment, IBM, Data General, Kmart, and Kodak.

Maintain closeness and friendliness with clients; focus on creating corporate values; seek productivity via people; do more than talk and stay value driven; focus on intrinsic strengths are among the lessons gained. "Action-oriented" was one of the things I used to enjoy. "When we had a serious difficulty, we gathered 10 senior personnel into one room for nearly a week," a senior management of Digital Equipment Corporation once recalled. They''ll figure it out and put it into practice." However, they all gave incorrect replies in the end. There are several lessons to be gained from this "ten persons in a room" scenario.

And you won''t find any more assistance in Tom Peters'' later works. "The more we talked to Peters in the 1990s, the more people understood that Peters spent too much time talking about remarkable things, instances of which could not be done," according to a Fortune article. (13 November 2000)