So working-age people, although still numbering in the billions, will grow more scarce and expensive in many areas. For one thing, birth rates are plummeting in much of the world, often in countries that were already aging.

Peters has never ignored the human factor in business, and his contention that a focus on people will be paramount going forward couldn’t be timelier. Profit is hardly mentioned business here is about making the world better, about beauty and compassion and meaning. Apologize when you need to, and do so like you mean it. For heaven’s sake, get out and talk to customers, and listen to people. Get your hands dirty, damn it! Treasure your frontline managers, and treat your part-timers right, too. Small is preferred to large, and action to inertia. Many of Peters’s traditional themes are here, including a conception of excellence as a way of life and business as a path of virtue. Some of the quotes are pretty good, such as this crack by economist Paul Ormerod, which reflects Peters’s love of small and medium-sized enterprises: “I am often asked by would-be entrepreneurs seeking escape from life within huge corporate structures, ‘How do I build a small firm for myself?’ The answer seems obvious: Buy a very large one and just wait.”Īt the heart of this new volume is the urgent recognition that above all else, leaders will have to pay far more attention to people from here on out. Waterman published In Search of Excellence, one of the most successful business books of all time. Excellence Now captures the highlights of a lifetime of reading, thinking, and making observations by the man who rocketed to fame in 1982 when he and Robert H. To do that, they may well have to rethink their business’s presumed purpose.įor the traditionally loquacious Peters, the book is a model of economy. And at the heart of his new volume is the urgent recognition that above all else, leaders will have to pay far more attention to people from here on out. The phrase “damn it” appears 19 times by my count.īut the book, the best business book of the year on leadership, is significant for one big reason: it is the avowed summa of a man who has been the nation’s premier management guru for decades. Exclamation points and capital letters abound. In his short new volume, he tells us things he’s told us in his many previous books, and he insists we need to run out and do every one of them right now.

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