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The Gospel According to Peters
| Article
# : |
10016 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
2,584 Words |
| Author
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Judith Garwood
Judith Garwood is a journalist and broadcaster focusing on
business news. She is an associate editor of New Management
magazine in Los Angeles. |
Tom Peters is the Bruce Springsteen, the Robert Redford, the Billy Graham of the management-consulting crowd. He has the whatever-it-takes to turn a fad into a phenomenon. He is, all by himself, a multimillion-dollar corporation. His first book, In Search of Excellence, coauthored with Robert Waterman (who has since become a forgotten man), sold 1.4 million hardcover copies and 2.3 million paperback copies in America alone. It has been translated into 15 languages. The hardcover version of the book was ranked number one by The New York Times for 40 of its 59 weeks on the list. The book was the first in publishing history to rank number one on hardcover and paperback lists at the same time. His second book, A Passion for excellence, coauthored with Nancy Austin (who was the forgotten woman before the ink was dry), sold half a million copies in the first six months. Given that, it is hard to form critical judgments, hard to step back, tune out the fanfare, and look once again at the book that started it all. Nevertheless, here goes.
As I reread the book, I allowed myself to slip back in time to the autumn of 1982, remembering my initial enthusiasm. I was given a copy of the galleys in my role as assistant editor of USC's fledgling New Management magazine. Since I was also finishing up an MBA at USC, having walked away, in a fit of midlife crisis, from a career as a television newscaster specializing in business and financial news, I felt that I was peculiarly well equipped to appreciate that book: as a newscaster, I had developed a sense of what was going right and what was going wrong with American business that was fairly congruent with what Peters and Waterman were saying. As a business school student, I knew they were right about what was
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