Top 180 Tom Peters Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.”

— Tom Peters

2. “Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.”

— Tom Peters

3. “The thing that keeps a business ahead of the competition is excellence in execution.”

— Tom Peters

4. “Ready, fire, aim. Do it! Make it happen! Action counts. No one ever sat their way to success.”

— Tom Peters

Featured in: Quotes About Fire

5. “Leaders win through logistics. Vision, sure. Strategy, yes. But when you go to war, you need to have both toilet paper and bullets at the right place at the right time. In other words, you must win through superior logistics.”

— Tom Peters

6. “Never, ever rest on your laurels. Today’s laurels are tomorrow’s compost.”

— Tom Peters

Featured in: History Quotes

7. “There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity.”

— Tom Peters

Featured in: Integrity Quotes

8. “Excellence is not an aspiration. Excellence is what you do in the next five minutes.”

— Tom Peters

9. “Hire attitude train skills.”

— Tom Peters

10. “One size NEVER fits all. One size fits one. Period.”

— Tom Peters

11. “If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.”

— Tom Peters

12. “Public Speaking is a skill that can be studied, polished, perfected. Not only can you get good at it, you can get damn good at it and it makes a heck of a difference.”

— Tom Peters

13. “Quality involves living the message of the possibility of perfection and infinite improvement, living it day in and day out, decade by decade.”

— Tom Peters

Featured in: Quality Quotes, Perfection Quotes

14. “Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.”

— Tom Peters

15. “The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.”

— Tom Peters

16. “Listen to Everyone. Ideas come from everywhere.”

— Tom Peters

17. “If not excellence, what? If not excellence now, when?”

— Tom Peters

18. “Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.”

— Tom Peters

19. “Celebrate what you want to see more of.”

— Tom Peters

20. “One percent improvement in 1,000 things is better than 1,000% improvement in one thing.”

— Tom Peters

21. “Do it, fix it, try it.”

— Tom Peters

22. “Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.”

— Tom Peters

23. “Good managers have a bias for action.”

— Tom Peters

24. “The best leaders are the best notetakers, best askers, and best learners.”

— Tom Peters

25. “Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”

— Tom Peters

26. “Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.”

— Tom Peters

27. “In McKinsey’s world, all of life is one of two things: strategy or organization.”

— Tom Peters

28. “It’s this simple: You are a brand. You are in charge of your brand. There is no single path to success. And there is no one right way to create the brand called You. Except this: Start today. Or else.”

— Tom Peters

29. “If a window of opportunity appears, don’t pull down the shade.”

— Tom Peters

30. “Brand inside is more important than brand outside for sustained success.”

— Tom Peters

31. “Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It’s about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it’s about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.”

— Tom Peters

32. “Organizations exist to serve. Period. Leaders live to serve. Period.”

— Tom Peters

33. “A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand.”

— Tom Peters

34. “You will be remembered, in the long haul, for the quality of your work, not the quantity of your work. No one evaluates Picasso based on the number of paintings he churned out.”

— Tom Peters

35. “Don’t ‘tolerate’ mistakes. Embrace them!”

— Tom Peters

36. “Fail faster. Succeed sooner.” – David Kelley, founder IDEO.”

— Tom Peters

37. “A passive approach to professional growth will leave you by the wayside.”

— Tom Peters

38. “Learning is a matter of intensity not elapsed time.”

— Tom Peters

39. “To meet the demands of the fast-changing competitive scene, we must simply learn to love change as much as we have hated it in the past.”

— Tom Peters

40. “Dot the i’s, cross the t’s, answer the phones promptly, send out errorless invoices, and in general never forget that the devil is in the details.”

— Tom Peters

41. “There are few things that will take you further in life, than your ability to make a good presentation.”

— Tom Peters

42. “Smile if it kills you. The physiology of smiling diffuses a lot of anger and angst. It makes your body and soul feel better.”

— Tom Peters

43. “You can’t think your way out of a box; you’ve got to act.”

— Tom Peters

44. “Customers perceive service in their own unique, idiosyncratic, emotional, irrational, end-of-the-day, and totally human terms. Perception is all there is!”

— Tom Peters

45. “Have you set high standards in the past that make it clear what level of performance you demand?”

— Tom Peters

46. “The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.”

— Tom Peters

47. “You can’t live life without an eraser.”

— Tom Peters

48. “Develop a respect and reverence for the principle of variation: the idea that the message ain’t in the mean, the mode or the median – it’s in the differences that occur throughout a population.”

— Tom Peters

49. “The ‘value added’ for most any company, tiny or enormous, comes from the Quality of Experience provided.”

— Tom Peters

50. “What you decide not to do is probably more important that what you decide to do.”

— Tom Peters