The Idea of Excellence
Following the publication in 1982 of the best-selling management book of all time – In Search of Excellence, written by two consultants, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman – a movement grew up behind the main idea in the book, the idea of excellence. The authors claimed to have found eight attributes that characterised what they defined as excellent companies in the United States (the subtext read “try them and you can be excellent too”).
These were as follows.
- A bias for action. In many of these companies, claimed the authors, the standard operating procedure is “Do it, fix it, try it”.
- Close to the customer. Excellent companies “learn from the people they serve”.
- Autonomy and entrepreneurship. The authors quote one description of 3m, a leading role model: it is “so intent on innovation that its essential atmosphere seems not like that of a large corporation, but rather a loose network of laboratories and cubbyholes populated by feverish inventors and dauntless entrepreneurs who let their imaginations fiy in all directions”.
- Productivity through people. Excellent companies have a deep- seated respect for the rank and file and do not regard “capital investment as the fundamental source of efficiency improvement”.
- Hands-on, value driven. In excellent companies the top managers believe in management by walking about.
- Stick to the knitting. “The odds for excellent performance seem strongly to favour those companies that stay reasonably close to businesses they know.”
- Simple form, lean staff. Simple form means having no matrix management, and an organisation in which “it is not uncommon to find a corporate staff of fewer than 100 people running multibillion dollar enterprises”.
- Simultaneous loose-tight properties. “Excellent companies are both centralised and decentralised.” The last was perhaps the most difficult of all the attributes to understand and put into effect. As the authors wrote: “Most of these eight attributes are not startling. Some, if not most, are motherhoods.”