Top 180 Tom Peters Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Bold botches are to be cherished.”

— Tom Peters

102. “Who, precisely, are your Dreamers? Are their Dreams in Technicolor? Do you allow their most Outrageous Dreams to be seen in public?”

— Tom Peters

103. “I am my clients. I am defined by who I do business with.”

— Tom Peters

104. “You have to stand out if you want to move up.”

— Tom Peters

105. “We cannot innovate without opening the door to havoc.”

— Tom Peters

106. “OLD: Be No.1 or No.2 in Your Market. NEW: Find a Niche, Create Something New.”

— Tom Peters

107. “If things seem under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” – Mario Andretti, race-car driver.”

— Tom Peters

108. “The company’s most urgent task is to learn to welcome, beg for, demand – innovation from everyone.”

— Tom Peters

109. “OPPORTUNITY is not “knocking.” It is pounding on your door.”

— Tom Peters

110. “Organize as much as possible around teams, to achieve enhanced focus, task orientation, innovativeness, and individual commitment.”

— Tom Peters

111. “Companies have got to learn to eat change for breakfast.”

— Tom Peters

112. “Without exception, the dominance and coherence of culture proved to be an essential quality of the excellent companies.”

— Tom Peters

113. “The drive for control, or the perception thereof, is truly the strongest force in human nature.”

— Tom Peters

114. “The day firing becomes easy is the day to fire yourself.”

— Tom Peters

115. “How do you humiliate and demean someone and then expect him or her to care about product quality.”

— Tom Peters

116. “Are Your Customers saying WOW?”

— Tom Peters

117. “Who comes first? Don’t be silly, says King Hal; it’s employees. That is – and this dear Watson, is elementary – if you genuinely want to put customers first, you must put employees more first.”

— Tom Peters

118. “The good news – and it is largely good news – is that everyone has a chance to stand out. Everyone has a chance to learn, improve, and build up their skills. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark.”

— Tom Peters

119. “Effective listening is a professional achievement-achieved only through hard work.”

— Tom Peters

120. “The widespread availability of information is the only basis for effective day-to-day problem solving, which abets continuous improvement programs.”

— Tom Peters

121. “Success requires a persistent misreading of the odds.”

— Tom Peters

122. “Lists simplify, clarify, edify.”

— Tom Peters

123. “Business is about people. It’s about passion. It’s about bold ideas, bold small ideas or bold large ideas.”

— Tom Peters

124. “The race will go to the curious, the slightly mad, and those with an un-satiated passion for learning and dare-deviltry.”

— Tom Peters

125. “Advantage comes not from the spectacular or the technical. Advantage comes from a persistent seeking of the mundane edge.”

— Tom Peters

126. “Skill at creating, exploiting, and exiting crucial alliances beats ownership of fixed assets.”

— Tom Peters

127. “A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.”

— Tom Peters

128. “Musing on the phrase ‘waste of time.’ So much more complex than it appears. Many ‘wastes of time’ small talk, daydreaming are imperatives.”

— Tom Peters

129. “In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.”

— Tom Peters

130. “Don’t let the vision be shot through with holes, but be damn sure some of your best and brightest are shooting at it – with bazookas as well as sniper’s rifles.”

— Tom Peters

131. “They say plan it. I say do it.”

— Tom Peters

132. “The best kept secret in the global economy today is this: When your service is AWESOME you get so stinking rich you have to buy new bags to carry all the money home.”

— Tom Peters

133. “Business book writing for me is when some set of ideas gets stuck in my mind, I write a book about it. I haven’t got a theory and I haven’t got a framework.”

— Tom Peters

134. “Unless you walk out into the unknown, the odds of making a profound difference in your life are pretty low.”

— Tom Peters

135. “Rewards should go to teams as a whole.”

— Tom Peters

136. “One simply cannot pay tribute to Stephen Covey without saying at the outset that he was a lovely human being.”

— Tom Peters

137. “The unthinkable is thinkable. No: likely.”

— Tom Peters

138. “Accept change as a friend. And don’t take yourself too seriously.”

— Tom Peters

139. “As a consumer, you want to associate with brands whose powerful presence creates a halo effect that rubs off on you.”

— Tom Peters

140. “The number one premise of business is that it need not be boring or dull. It ought to be fun. If it’s not fun, you’re wasting your life.”

— Tom Peters

141. “I urge you to set a tough, quantitative target for adding “differentiators” as I call them, to every service you provide.”

— Tom Peters

142. “It’s not enough to be close to the customer. You’ve got to be glued to the customer.”

— Tom Peters

143. “All white-collar work is project work. The single salient fact that touches all of our lives is that work is being reinvented.”

— Tom Peters

144. “Nothing good or great can be done in the absence of enthusiasm.”

— Tom Peters

145. “Lavish credit on anyone and everyone who helped you the least bit.”

— Tom Peters

146. “If there is a single tragic flaw that mars our biggest enterprises, it is conservatism – the failure to fail, and fail big, in an era of unprecedented volatility and ambiguity.”

— Tom Peters

147. “Progress is mostly the product of rogues.”

— Tom Peters

148. “I don’t want the 35-year-olds in my audience to think of me as as ‘pops’ giving the kind of advice that only 65-year-olds can understand.”

— Tom Peters

149. “Every managerial act must be seen as an unequivocal support for urgency in pursuit of constant testing, change, and improvement.”

— Tom Peters

150. “We are all Michaelangelos.”

— Tom Peters