44. Tom Peters searching for small business excellence in tough times No 6
Precept Number 5 from In Search of Excellence is: ‘Hands-on, Value-Driven: A bit enigmatic, but what Peters means by this is that management does not retire from the frontline and only get involved in strategy, but gets ‘stuck in’, and that the business that they get stuck into is driven by a management philosophy which […]
43. Tom Peters searching for small business excellence in tough times No 5
Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s fourth precept for successful businesses in In Search of Excellence was people productivity. Peters was very interested in the tendency of large corporations to focus heavily on and invest significantly in equipment in their search for improved performance and competitiveness, but to rarely give a similar focus on people. Automating […]
42. Tom Peters searching for small business excellence in tough times No 4
Tom Peter’s & Robert Waterman’s third precept from In Search of Excellence was focusing on Autonomy and Entrepreneurship, where he believed that many large US corporations at the time of the book were failing. For Peters this was about giving product or market champions their head, with a degree of authority and responsibility. Within policy guidelines […]
41. Tom Peters searching for small business excellence in tough times No 3
Tom Peters’ and Robert Waterman’s second precept for successful US businesses was: Stay Close to the Customer. Rocket-science it definitely is not, but it is very important and quite easy for large businesses to lose sight of, as Peters well knew. In large and mid-size businesses sometimes the senior executives insulate themselves from the customer. […]
40. Tom Peters searching for small business excellence in tough times No 2
Peters & Waterman’s first theme which characterised successful businesses from their study of 43 ‘successful’ US businesses was: A bias for action. What they meant by this was that they were companies that did not generally feel the need to spend years studying any development and months contemplating any action. They tended to get on with it, and […]
38. Peter Drucker interpreted for small business part 10
This is the last part on Drucker. Drucker wrote a lot about motivation. Although like Frederick Winslow Taylor he wanted to build a business system, unlike Taylor Drucker is always aware of the human dimension. He talks about the need to be passionate about what you do, always learning and enjoying. This is not always easy […]
37. Peter Drucker in his own words interpreted for small business part 9
Peter Drucker’s three questions – although starting with ‘what is our business?’ are essentially externally focused on the customer, how they see your business and what they value. But Drucker also looks a lot at the internal process in terms of releasing the capabilities of people and focusing talents on where they are best employed. […]
36. Peter Drucker in his own words interpreted for small business part 8
“What is our business? Who are our customers? What do they value? These are Drucker’s three classic questions and they reduce to very simple non-academic terms what is often turned into a highly theoretical strategic debate. These questions reduce that debate to the essential simplicities – for business is basically simple although it is often […]
35. Peter Drucker in his own words interpreted for small business 7
“What is measured improves”. Peter Drucker built this into a manegment system – Management by Objectives – but of course people have always set objectives. One early business example of using the principles of ‘what is measured improves’ is Alfred P Sloane at General Motors in the 1920s. He was an advocate of management by walking […]
33. Peter Drucker in his own words interpreted for small business 5
“The assumptions on which most businesses are being run today no longer fit reality”. Drucker wrote this quite a few years ago when the pace of change in the business world was slower and there was more of a tendency for businesses to believe that the way the market worked for them was fairly fixed. As […]
