In search of excellence
by Thomas J. Peters · first published 1982
12% recommend50% neutral38% critical
Discusses eight basic practices characteristic of successfully managed companies.
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…I'd recommend.... Good to Great by Jim Collins One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters
on “Ask HN: If you could recommend only three management books...” ↗Hum. This article turned out to be targeted at big company types, not entrepreneurs. Innovation at big companies almost never works anyway. The authors of "In Search of Excellence" did excellent research on just that, and found that inventions which had big impacts almost always came from companies with less than a few dozen people.
on “Why Products Fail” ↗Thomas, J.P. & Robert, H.W Jr 2004. "In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies", Harper Paperbacks. Ignore what the critics say about this book because I think this book's strengths is in their case studies on the company cultures and…
on “What are some good books for tech company founders?” ↗…to writing. Strunk and White, where is your empirical data? What's your control? Where are your PDE's? Some also have aspects of business productivity books, with well-known common-sense ideas, like In Search of Excellence (which made up case studies, and a co-author said what's the problem?) Even Fred Brooks' Mythical Man-Month - informed by his leadership of the massive bet-the-company "360" project at IBM - lacks data.…
on “Software Architecture Guide” ↗…wrote about, that would refute GtG pretty well. One can also imagine scenarios between these two poles where it might not be so clear. By the way, your point reminds me of a similar one people made about In Search of Excellence (the GtG of its day), the "excellent" companies of which didn't seem so excellent a few years later.
on “"Good to Great" Circuit City finally dead, could be managed with Quickbooks.” ↗The takeaway here should be: if the book doesn't systematically examine the differences between winners and losers, drop it and walk away. Sentence by sentence, it's making you dumber. So forget In Search of Excellence. Try books like How To Be a Star at Work, which is based on a pretty rigorous study of employee productivity.
on “Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias” ↗…directed at a specific accomplishment * Humorous or series awards in the form of plaques, certificates, trophies, and the like * Special events to celebrate significant accomplishments > In In Search of Excellence, Peters and Waterman (1982) report that the companies that manage to stay in the top halves of their industries over 20-year periods make extensive use of nonmonetary incentives. Under "Morale Killers",…
on “Awards are Bullshit” ↗…while being leisurely enough not to require any strenuous intellectual activity on the part of the reader. It's basically DisneyWords. This is a well-tried genre used across a wide variety of subjects. In Search of Excellence and The Omnivore's Dilemma both use the same style despite their contexts being very different. And Weiner uses American-Folksy here for precisely the same reasons and to precisely the same effect. The…
on “Notes from Malcolm Gladwell's Writing Masterclass” ↗…outstanding firms and the less successful firms studied in Built to Last shrank to almost nothing in the period following the study. The average profitability of the companies identified in the famous In Search of Excellence dropped sharply as well within a short time. A study of Fortune’s “Most Admired Companies” finds that over a twenty-year period, the firms with the worst ratings went on to earn much higher stock returns…
on “Yahoo's Marissa Mayer could get $55M in severance pay” ↗Ever since I read McKinsey's "in search of excellence" I've been a bit skeptical of these sort of "to run your company better just follow this one weird trick" pieces. The book when I read it was quite convincing, but when I read the results of the companies…
on “The Feedback Fallacy” ↗…one else will have the faintest idea that this is my fault and anyway I will probably be sacked for not filling some form properly so sod it." The McKinsey driven cult of performance management (cf. In Search of Excellence, Build to Last and Beyond Performance) has done huge damage. This sets managers against employees in a forced pantomime of marking and red queen style denotions of performance. Management time is burned…
on “Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management” ↗In Search of Excellence (the classic of this genre) had the same problem. Being profiled in a pop-business book should be considered a huge red flag.
on “Feds to take over Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac” ↗The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig, does a good job describing many of the problems with popular business books like Good to Great and In Search of Excellence. It's worth reading. http://www.amazon.com/Halo-Effect-Business-Delusions-Manager...
on “Feds to take over Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac” ↗…blogosphere would go up in a puff of smoke if people would simply read the business books that stand the test of time." I think it does and is appropriate. I've been around long enough to have read "In search of Excellence" which Levitt refers to this way "These business books are mostly backward-looking". What the books that are backward looking don't reveal is the companies that follow the same practices that have failed.…
on “The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth” ↗Exactly. The problem with this sample is the same as In Search of Excellence - you can see what the good companies do, but what makes them unique? You can correct for it somewhat by adding comparison companies that failed, but the real thing to look for is very similar companies…
on “Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups” ↗