Summary of Tom Peters & Robert H. Waterman's In Search of Excellence

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 The most helpful ideas were coming from the strangest places. In 1962, the business historian Alfred Chandler wrote Strategy and Structure, in which he expressed the very powerful notion that structure follows strategy. The conventional wisdom was that Chandler’s dictum had the makings of universal truth.

#2 The problem of management effectiveness is that the dearth of practical additions to old ways of thought is painfully apparent. The stream of thought that today’s researchers are tapping is an old one, started in the 1930s by Elton Mayo and Chester Barnard, who challenged ideas put forward by Max Weber, who defined the bureaucratic form of organization.

#3 The role of a leader is to harness the social forces in the organization, to shape and guide values. Good managers are value shapers concerned with the informal social properties of organization.

#4 The intangibles that top-performing managers describe are much more in line with Weick and March than with Taylor or Chandler. They talk about family feeling, small is beautiful, and simplicity rather than complexity.