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Economics Without Numbers
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# : |
10017 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1986 |
4,538 Words |
| Author
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Philip Keisling
Philip Keisling is an editor of The Washington Monthly. |
At the beginning of 1984, In Search of Excellence, by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, was the best-selling book in America--56 weeks after it first broke onto the charts. Five years ago, if a book with this title had achieved similar renown, its subject doubtless would have been something like "personal growth." But the subtitle of Peters' and Waterman's book--Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies--reveals that its exhortations are not aimed at affecting our behavior as individuals, but at changing how we act collectively.
The phenomenon of In Search of Excellence--and that is precisely the correct word, with [over 5 million] copies now in print--is a heartening sign of how popular tastes have undergone a sea-change in recent years. "Entrepreneurship," a world that once instantly identified the utterer as an enthusiast of Ayn Rand, is now often bandied about whenever academicians, journalists, and even presidential candidates discuss the economy. In Search of Excellence is also a best-seller on college campuses. And if the public has been enthusiastic, many in the business community have taken to the book with the guilty zeal of converts at a revival meeting. A Ford Motor Company official recently told an assembly of executives, "We weren't on the list of excellent companies, and we didn't deserve to be. We intend to be five years from now." Charles Brown, the chief executive officer of AT&T, took his top executives on a two-day retreat to discuss the book. Donald Burr, whose fledgling People's Express airline wasn't profiled in the book but well could have been, called In Search of Excellence "the most significant book about economics since Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations." Co-author Peters says that the reaction among corporate managers has "astonished him," adding, "there seems to be a real hunger out there to
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