Eight summarizing points on America’s best run companies:
1. Bias for action- but doesn’t mean without analysis

2. Staying close to customers- but doesn’t mean more costly. Service obsession, quality obsession and nichemanship

3. Autonomy and entrepreneurship- use and support of champion, intense communication and tolerance for failure

4. Productivity through people- language, celebration and sharing of information

5. Hands on and value driven- having a strong belief and go to your people to execute it

6. Stick to the knitting- remaining with the business the company knows best

7. Simple form, lead staff

8. Simultaneous loose-tight properties- fostering a climate where there is a dedication to The Central values of the company combined with tolerance for all employees who accept those values

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would.

The principles for success still hold up in the business world from what I have seen.

It’s a great summary of what to focus on.

Not worth the time

Some of the ideas may not apply today. For example, the top companies in America today are tech companies, the likes of FANG, the book`s content therefore is outdated and less relevant today

A more cluttered, less scholarly look than Michael Collins "Good to Great" into what makes organizations succeed.

I really liked it and recommend it to everyone at all levels.
Prior to reading many books and due to my many other personal responsibilities,
I couldn't get enough time to really write a personalized review,
but this is really a good book you have to read.

Some poignant reflections useful at the time of reading, several years back.

In the early 1980's, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman were consultants at McKinsey and Company who were given the task of looking at a number of successful US companies and seeing if they could find commonalities. They chose about 43 firms, based on financial performance and general reputation and then did a series of interviews with executives at those firms as well as a survey of articles written about those firms (what those of us in academia would call a literature review.) The results of those research efforts was this book.

Peters and Waterman identified about eight themes that seemed to be constant in the "excellent" companies. 35 years later on, some of those ideas are now so common place that it's hard to imagine a time when they were not. For example, how could any company survive without being "close to the customer?" Many large corporations spend half of their marketing budgets on collecting consumer insights. And the idea of treating your employees like human beings? That's called I/O Psychology these days. Or failing early and often? Try "minimum viable product" or "rapid prototyping." Nonetheless, I am sure that much of this was groundbreaking at the time and the fact that these concepts are now largely fundamental in modern business shows how influential all of this really was or is.

After a lengthy introduction, Peters and Waterman approach the book through the lenses of their eight themes, chapter by chapter. They provide anecdotes and stories from their interviews to back their themes up. The approach feels a little abstract and it meanders at times. There isn't a lot of quantitative data. Still, the stories are entertaining and even enlightening, and some of the concepts (e.g. "management by walking around") are now legendary.

The trouble as a reader is of course that much of this has now been done quite a bit better by other writers and researchers. If you like the concept of this book, you'll probably like Built to Last or Good to Great even better. Jim Collins approached similar ideas with a great deal more rigor and a (seemingly) more disciplined and quantitative approach.

This book is considered a business classic and it's not a bad read at all. It's certainly not unreadable and many of the ideas still ring true. Just know if you tackle it that it's old enough now to be a historical text and one that has been superseded by other more contemporary studies.

Very accessible and clearly written for a book on management and organization, packed with persuasive descriptions, and an interesting read for yet another housebound day of the pandemic, but that doesn't mean everything in it is entirely believable. Still, it's a source of ideas.
It also prompts many questions: Why have so many "excellent" companies failed in the four decades since publication? How much do the "excellent" management methods cause business success and how much are they coincidental? Why did 19 of the 63 companies originally listed for the authors to study get ruled out because they were not delivering on standard metrics of financial success? Since very much seems to depend on a corporate leader (often a company founder), what is the right balance between that leader being ruthless in instilling a corporate culture and being tolerant and a mentor? If many companies are not excellent, why are CEOs being paid at levels increasingly out of touch with the real world inhabited by their employees? Does calling employees "associates" (a Walmart touch) or some other euphemism really indicate teamwork, or does it indicate an attempt to obscure the realities of the workplace social structure? How much of the approach did Adam Smith anticipate 200 years earlier? Et cetera, et cetera. The book also develops some redundancy in the last 100 pages. Nevertheless, reading it is a bit like learning a new language, which is always useful. Some of the concepts, such as having to deal with basic human irrationality, also seem applicable to politics and perhaps other fields.

This was the classic management bible of the 80s.

Sort of "Built to Last" of that era.

Back then I loved it. Now I am a lot more skeptical.

Found on the page xxvii of the book “The Innovators Dilemma”

One of the best business books written. The content is as relevant today as 20 years ago. Timeless