Journalists took naturally to the concept and message, which resembled and seemed to validate what journalists themselves do. There were many reasons for the vast ripple effects of the book, including Tom Peters's tremendous gifts as a proselytizer and a showman. Some of these themes, such as "a bias for action" and sticking "close to the customer," have become such staples of discussion about business that it's startling to realize that the terms were coined only twenty years ago.
Peters and Waterman identified forty-three large American companies that exemplified "excellent" practice they told real stories, with real names and dates and inside details, to illustrate how those companies made their choices and did their work and they extracted eight broad themes that, they said, distinguished a successful company, whether it made blue jeans ( Levi Strauss), airplanes ( Boeing), or candy ( Mars). Although the authors had both been consultants at McKinsey & Company, the book they wrote departed radically from the dry, sanitized tone of most consulting documents. Waterman Jr., which was published in 1982 and has sold some three million copies since. The change in business analysis began with In Search of Excellence, by Thomas J. It isn't often that one can trace a decades-long intellectual shift to a single book, but in this case the connection is inescapable. But as I've watched the ups and downs of the Internet-and-venture-capital complex that is based in the San Francisco area, I've started to have some doubts. For a long time I happily went along with this trend, both in what I chose to read about companies and in what I noticed and sometimes wrote about them. Next up: further pharmaceutical and biotech wonders.ĭuring those twenty years the prevailing way of talking and writing about business achievement shifted in a correspondingly light, clean, interesting direction-with less emphasis on details of production and distribution, and more fascination with the "culture" of a company as the root of failure or success. Until recently the Internet and communications in general were booming, epitomized by and AOL.
#FORGET DEEP DREAMER GOOGLE SOFTWARE#
First came semiconductors (epitomized by Intel), then personal computers ( Apple and Compaq), and then software ( Microsoft). Over the past twenty years the United States has enjoyed successive booms of light, clean, "interesting" industry.
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