Articoli correlati a In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's...

In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies - Brossura

 
9780060548780: In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies

Sinossi

The "Greatest Business Book of All Time" (Bloomsbury UK), In Search of Excellence has long been a must-have for the boardroom, business school, and bedside table.

Based on a study of forty-three of America's best-run companies from a diverse array of business sectors, In Search of Excellence describes eight basic principles of management -- action-stimulating, people-oriented, profit-maximizing practices -- that made these organizations successful.

Joining the HarperBusiness Essentials series, this phenomenal bestseller features a new Authors' Note, and reintroduces these vital principles in an accessible and practical way for today's management reader.

Le informazioni nella sezione "Riassunto" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.

Informazioni sugli autori

Thomas J. Peters, "uber-guru of business" (Fortune and The Economist), is the author of many international bestsellers, including A Passion for Excellence and Thriving on Chaos. Peters, "the father of the post-modern corporation" (Los Angeles Times), is the chairman of Tom Peters Company and lives in Vermont.



Robert H. Waterman, Jr. is the bestselling author of The Renewal Factor, Adhocracy, and What America Does Right, and the director of The Waterman Group, Inc.

Dalla quarta di copertina

The "Greatest Business Book of All Time" (Bloomsbury UK), In Search of Excellence has long been a must-have for the boardroom, business school, and bedside table.

Based on a study of forty-three of America's best-run companies from a diverse array of business sectors, In Search of Excellence describes eight basic principles of management -- action-stimulating, people-oriented, profit-maximizing practices -- that made these organizations successful.

Joining the HarperBusiness Essentials series, this phenomenal bestseller features a new Authors' Note, and reintroduces these vital principles in an accessible and practical way for today's management reader.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

In Search of Excellence

By Peters, Thomas J.

HarperBusiness

ISBN: 0060548789

Author's Note

As we look back on the two decades since the publication of Excellence, our main feeling is delight. Delight that so many people embraced the book. Delight in that we think we mainly got it right.

Our main detractors point to the decline of some of the companies we featured. They miss the point, which was to learn from those who'd had a long run of success, just as we learn from athletes in their prime. We weren't writing Forever Excellent, just as it would be absurd to expect any great athlete not to age. (The sheer longevity of Procter & Gamble'ssuccess is, however, intriguing.) And to the most hardheaded of our critics on this dimension: had you bought an "excellence index" when we published and held it through 2002, your total return would have been 1,300 percent, compared to around 800 percent for the Dow and 600 percent for the S&P 500.

What we take most pleasure in is sticking to our guns in putting several theory chapters up front: "The Rational Model," "Man Waiting for Motivation," and "Managing Ambiguity and Paradox." We told the readers they could skip these. Now we don't think so. They should be read and are just as relevant today as when we originally published.

In brief, we were saying the following (but don't skip the chapters). First, people and organizations are not "rational" in the ways strategy, business, and organization are typically taught. It's dangerous to try to force a simplistic and misguided rationality on the way we manage. You cannot just manage "by the numbers." Don't even think about it.

Second, most of the management systems that treat people as "factors of production," as cogs in an industrial machine, are inherently demotivating. People are wonderfully different and complex. Leaders need to set people free to help, not try to harness them.

Third, the world is a confusing place, full of ambiguity. The hardest thing to manage is the "soft stuff," especially culture. Yet without serious attention to the so-called soft stuff, leaders will fail.

Nor would we change our eight attributes of excellence, though we're perfectly aware that another researcher, looking at the same data, might pick a different set. These eight pretty clearly describe what's different about the top performers:

A bias for action. In its simplest terms, this says "get out there and try something." Just as you don't learn anything in science without experimenting, you don't learn anything in business without trying, failing, and trying again. The trick, and it's a tough one, is a common cultural understanding of what kind of failure is okay and what kind leads to disaster. But don't kid yourself. No amount of analysis, especially market research, will lead to true innovation.

Close to the customer. This may be the hardest to accomplish and perhaps where our sample of excellent companies -- IBM, Hewlett-Packard, K Mart, and even McDonald's -- got off the track. It's hard. There's so much to pay attention to inside an organization that has time to understand customers, especially when the set of customers includes distributors and wonderfully irrational end users. Yet Procter's skill at keeping everyone in the organization in close touch with customers, combined with a formidable innovative capability, may explain that company's incredibly long history of success.

Autonomy and entrepreneurship. Even if you're big, act small. Organizations are simply collections of people, and people don't relate well to big, abstract entities. If you want to understand the success of Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Wal-Mart, and the original HP, look to the fact that they organize themselves into small, relatively independent units, held together by common goals and cultural norms.

Productivity through people. As the youngsters say, "Duh!" What else counts in an organization except people? Everyone gives lip service to the importance of their people, yet only a few really treat them as other than cannon fodder. One of the best examples we've ever seen was Delta Airlines with its "family feeling," which was so special that in 1982 employees banded together to spend a total of $30 million in payroll deductions to give their employer its first Boeing 767, the Spiritof Delta. Sadly, Delta lost that family feeling, maybe when it merged with Western Airlines.

Hands-on, value-driven. The idea is simple. Figure out what your company should stand for, what would give your people the most pride. Then actively manage toward that value system. Remember that profit is to business as breathing is to life. The top companies make meaning, not just money.

Stick to the knitting. Except for one or two notable exceptions, for example, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and Jack Welch's GE, business diversity almost never works. Be particularly leery of the word synergy, which sounds great -- who doesn't want 1 + 1 to equal 3? Well, our observation then and now is that big mergers rarely work. Further, nothing screws up a successful business more than hyperfast growth.

Simple form, lean staff. Though organizations are inherently quite complicated, one ought not make them more so via complex organizational arrangements. Install a simple and workable structure; people will figure out the rest. Keep staff to a minimum, outsource a lot of staff activities, or use time-limited, project-oriented task forces (another form of the line organization). Big staffs, and most career staff people, always seem to get in the way of the folks in organizations who get thereal work done.

Simultaneous loose-tight properties. Sorry about this chapter heading, but it does say what we mean. Any well-functioning organization is neither centralized nor decentralized but a wonderful combination of both. Around most dimensions the best companies, then and now, are loose. They give people exceptional freedom to do things their ownway. At the same time, the great companies are highly centralized around a few crucial dimensions: the central values that make up their culture, one or two (no more) top strategic priorities, and a few key financial indicators.

Those are our eight attributes, then and now. Both of us have done a great deal of writing since Excellence, and we've expressed what we've seen in different terms. But we've never done better than in this book. The attributes are just that: attributes, not principles. But until something clearly better comes along, we'll stick with these.

-- Tom Peters
Bob Waterman
November 2003

Continues...
Excerpted from In Search of Excellenceby Peters, Thomas J. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Le informazioni nella sezione "Su questo libro" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.

Compra usato

Condizioni: buono
Pages can have notes/highlighting...
Visualizza questo articolo

EUR 4,58 per la spedizione da U.S.A. a Italia

Destinazione, tempi e costi

EUR 3,44 per la spedizione da U.S.A. a Italia

Destinazione, tempi e costi

Risultati della ricerca per In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's...

Foto dell'editore

Peters, Thomas J.; Waterman, Robert H.
Editore: Harper Business, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060548789 ISBN 13: 9780060548780
Antico o usato Paperback

Da: ThriftBooks-Reno, Reno, NV, U.S.A.

Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle 5 stelle, Maggiori informazioni sulle valutazioni dei venditori

Paperback. Condizione: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.71. Codice articolo G0060548789I3N00

Contatta il venditore

Compra usato

EUR 5,60
Convertire valuta
Spese di spedizione: EUR 4,58
Da: U.S.A. a: Italia
Destinazione, tempi e costi

Quantità: 1 disponibili

Aggiungi al carrello

Foto dell'editore

Peters, Thomas J.; Waterman, Robert H.
Editore: Harper Business, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060548789 ISBN 13: 9780060548780
Antico o usato Paperback

Da: ThriftBooks-Dallas, Dallas, TX, U.S.A.

Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle 5 stelle, Maggiori informazioni sulle valutazioni dei venditori

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. No Jacket. May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.71. Codice articolo G0060548789I4N00

Contatta il venditore

Compra usato

EUR 5,60
Convertire valuta
Spese di spedizione: EUR 4,58
Da: U.S.A. a: Italia
Destinazione, tempi e costi

Quantità: 1 disponibili

Aggiungi al carrello

Foto dell'editore

Peters, Thomas J.; Waterman, Robert H.
Editore: Harper Business, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060548789 ISBN 13: 9780060548780
Antico o usato Paperback

Da: ThriftBooks-Dallas, Dallas, TX, U.S.A.

Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle 5 stelle, Maggiori informazioni sulle valutazioni dei venditori

Paperback. Condizione: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.71. Codice articolo G0060548789I3N00

Contatta il venditore

Compra usato

EUR 5,60
Convertire valuta
Spese di spedizione: EUR 4,58
Da: U.S.A. a: Italia
Destinazione, tempi e costi

Quantità: 1 disponibili

Aggiungi al carrello

Foto dell'editore

Peters, Thomas J.; Waterman, Robert H.
Editore: Harper Business, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060548789 ISBN 13: 9780060548780
Antico o usato Paperback

Da: ThriftBooks-Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ, U.S.A.

Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle 5 stelle, Maggiori informazioni sulle valutazioni dei venditori

Paperback. Condizione: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.71. Codice articolo G0060548789I3N00

Contatta il venditore

Compra usato

EUR 5,60
Convertire valuta
Spese di spedizione: EUR 4,58
Da: U.S.A. a: Italia
Destinazione, tempi e costi

Quantità: 1 disponibili

Aggiungi al carrello

Foto dell'editore

Peters, Thomas J.; Waterman, Robert H.
Editore: Harper Business, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060548789 ISBN 13: 9780060548780
Antico o usato Paperback

Da: ThriftBooks-Atlanta, AUSTELL, GA, U.S.A.

Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle 5 stelle, Maggiori informazioni sulle valutazioni dei venditori

Paperback. Condizione: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.71. Codice articolo G0060548789I3N00

Contatta il venditore

Compra usato

EUR 5,60
Convertire valuta
Spese di spedizione: EUR 4,58
Da: U.S.A. a: Italia
Destinazione, tempi e costi

Quantità: 1 disponibili

Aggiungi al carrello

Foto dell'editore

Thomas J. Peters
Editore: Harper Business, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060548789 ISBN 13: 9780060548780
Antico o usato Brossura

Da: medimops, Berlin, Germania

Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle 5 stelle, Maggiori informazioni sulle valutazioni dei venditori

Condizione: good. Befriedigend/Good: Durchschnittlich erhaltenes Buch bzw. Schutzumschlag mit Gebrauchsspuren, aber vollständigen Seiten. / Describes the average WORN book or dust jacket that has all the pages present. Codice articolo M00060548789-G

Contatta il venditore

Compra usato

EUR 6,82
Convertire valuta
Spese di spedizione: EUR 4,50
Da: Germania a: Italia
Destinazione, tempi e costi

Quantità: 2 disponibili

Aggiungi al carrello

Foto dell'editore

Peters Thomas, J. und H. Waterman Jr. Robert:
Editore: Harper Business, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060548789 ISBN 13: 9780060548780
Antico o usato paperback

Da: Studibuch, Stuttgart, Germania

Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle 5 stelle, Maggiori informazioni sulle valutazioni dei venditori

paperback. Condizione: Befriedigend. 400 Seiten; 9780060548780.4 Gewicht in Gramm: 500. Codice articolo 771034

Contatta il venditore

Compra usato

EUR 6,99
Convertire valuta
Spese di spedizione: EUR 13,90
Da: Germania a: Italia
Destinazione, tempi e costi

Quantità: 1 disponibili

Aggiungi al carrello

Immagini fornite dal venditore

Thomas J. Peters, Robert H. Waterman
ISBN 10: 0060548789 ISBN 13: 9780060548780
Nuovo Paperback

Da: Rarewaves USA, OSWEGO, IL, U.S.A.

Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle 5 stelle, Maggiori informazioni sulle valutazioni dei venditori

Paperback. Condizione: New. The "Greatest Business Book of All Time" (Bloomsbury UK), In Search of Excellence has long been a must-have for the boardroom, business school, and bedside table.Based on a study of forty-three of America's best-run companies from a diverse array of business sectors, In Search of Excellence describes eight basic principles of management -- action-stimulating, people-oriented, profit-maximizing practices -- that made these organizations successful.Joining the HarperBusiness Essentials series, this phenomenal bestseller features a new Authors' Note, and reintroduces these vital principles in an accessible and practical way for today's management reader. Codice articolo LU-9780060548780

Contatta il venditore

Compra nuovo

EUR 17,51
Convertire valuta
Spese di spedizione: EUR 3,44
Da: U.S.A. a: Italia
Destinazione, tempi e costi

Quantità: 5 disponibili

Aggiungi al carrello

Foto dell'editore

Thomas J. Peters
Editore: HarperCollins, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060548789 ISBN 13: 9780060548780
Nuovo PAP

Da: PBShop.store US, Wood Dale, IL, U.S.A.

Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle 5 stelle, Maggiori informazioni sulle valutazioni dei venditori

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000. Codice articolo IB-9780060548780

Contatta il venditore

Compra nuovo

EUR 20,49
Convertire valuta
Spese di spedizione: EUR 1,93
Da: U.S.A. a: Italia
Destinazione, tempi e costi

Quantità: 15 disponibili

Aggiungi al carrello

Foto dell'editore

Waterman, Robert H., Jr., Peters, Thomas J.
Editore: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060548789 ISBN 13: 9780060548780
Antico o usato Brossura

Da: Better World Books, Mishawaka, IN, U.S.A.

Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle 5 stelle, Maggiori informazioni sulle valutazioni dei venditori

Condizione: Good. (rev)04 Edition. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Codice articolo 4509889-6

Contatta il venditore

Compra usato

EUR 5,73
Convertire valuta
Spese di spedizione: EUR 16,71
Da: U.S.A. a: Italia
Destinazione, tempi e costi

Quantità: 4 disponibili

Aggiungi al carrello

Vedi altre 67 copie di questo libro

Vedi tutti i risultati per questo libro