Business guru Tom Peters has written a total of 18 business books selling in the aggregate more than 10,000,000 copies. But just one of those books is itself responsible for about half that total – or 5,000,000 copies. That book, In Search of Excellence, was published in 1982 in collaboration with Robert H. Waterman, Jr. and is to this day considered one of, if not the, most successful business books of all time.
I should note that neither Crestron, nor Randy Klein is featured in the book. But many of the 43 public companies that are profiled in that book as organizations that embraced processes that drive excellence would, in just a few short years after publication, fall into hard times themselves. Companies like Wang Labs, Xerox, and NCR in subsequent years were no longer excellent – and so it would seem that, as the old saying goes, “success is fleeting.”
