In Search for Excellence
In Search of Excellence | A review of the elements and the book. | | | | | 8/30/2010 | |
Thomas Friedman in his book “The World is Flat” outlines how the entire world is shrinking and become a close net ball replete with information highways transferring data, ideas and meaningful business information at a pace that was never imagined before. In the same way the concept of “speed” is conceptually driven in the mind of business leaders by Bill Gates in his famous book. Scores of management books today are being churned out virtually every day and it’s very difficult to judge how impactful they might be for the time they represent. What works for today has often been seen to be redundant the next time.
In Search of Excellence, a revolutionary book by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, published in 1982, changed the way business looked at itself for that decade and also became the reference point of debates, business ideas and strategies even till date. Even though critics have labeled the book as being “deficient in Theories” and lacking is strong models that come out of theories, it nevertheless has impacted business worldwide to change the way they function.
The Book
The Book was fallout of a project conducted by McKinsey in the year 1972. There were two projects first and major one, the Business Strategy Project, was allocated to top consultants at McKinsey's New York corporate HQ and was given star billing and later was branded as a total failure. The second 'weak-sister' project concerned Organization - structure and people. The Organization project was seen as less important, and was allocated to Peters and Waterman at San Francisco.
Peter went berserk on this project and travelled the entire globe talking to CEO’s, business entrepreneurs, Consultants on business and Teams with no aim to chart out a “business model “ or a plan. What culminated after this was a mammoth 700 page presentation which was later pruned down to produce the
Thomas Friedman in his book “The World is Flat” outlines how the entire world is shrinking and become a close net ball replete with information highways transferring data, ideas and meaningful business information at a pace that was never imagined before. In the same way the concept of “speed” is conceptually driven in the mind of business leaders by Bill Gates in his famous book. Scores of management books today are being churned out virtually every day and it’s very difficult to judge how impactful they might be for the time they represent. What works for today has often been seen to be redundant the next time.
In Search of Excellence, a revolutionary book by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, published in 1982, changed the way business looked at itself for that decade and also became the reference point of debates, business ideas and strategies even till date. Even though critics have labeled the book as being “deficient in Theories” and lacking is strong models that come out of theories, it nevertheless has impacted business worldwide to change the way they function.
The Book
The Book was fallout of a project conducted by McKinsey in the year 1972. There were two projects first and major one, the Business Strategy Project, was allocated to top consultants at McKinsey's New York corporate HQ and was given star billing and later was branded as a total failure. The second 'weak-sister' project concerned Organization - structure and people. The Organization project was seen as less important, and was allocated to Peters and Waterman at San Francisco.
Peter went berserk on this project and travelled the entire globe talking to CEO’s, business entrepreneurs, Consultants on business and Teams with no aim to chart out a “business model “ or a plan. What culminated after this was a mammoth 700 page presentation which was later pruned down to produce the