Tom Peters: The Excellence Dividend: The Interview!

Best-selling business author and speaker Tom Peters joins us on the show today, to discuss his latest book, The Excellence Dividend. Click here for the show transcript! Discussion guide for my conversation with Tom Peters: Hasn't everything about doing good, quality work already been said by all authors and business gurus? Why was this book necessary? So, what is the Excellence Dividend, exactly? One of the goals of the book is to discuss and understand the impact of technology on business, but more importantly, to remember what humans can (and always will) do better than a machine, correct? You talk about EXCELLENCE. Do we ever truly arrive there? Or is the lifelong pursuit of excellence the true mission, the real point to the effort? "Business IS the community." One of the most profound weaknesses of most people in business is their inability to LISTEN. With social media, technology, media, and all the noise, listening is even harder these days. We discuss at length how strength and influence comes with true listening. In the book, there is an important discussion about joy, and that most people in their work are joyless. We discuss why joy matters, who is responsible for bringing joy to the workplace, and how being joyful inspires creativity and innovation. Speaking of innovation, Tom and I have an important dialog about not only what innovation truly is, but how you do it. And while most of us overcomplicate, Tom explains how to do it successfully. And it's just a matter of rolling up your sleeves and trying things. To wrap the conversation, Tom shares advice on how to adopt the "Excellence Now" philosophy, and how to begin to embed the principles of his book into both our lives and our organizations. Not by sharing a memo, but by building this new culture one person at a time. You can find Tom Peters' book right here! Who is Tom Peters? Tom Peters is coauthor of In Search of Excellence—the book that changed the way the world does business, and often tagged as the best business book ever. Seventeen books and thirty-five years later, he’s still at the forefront of the “management guru industry” he single-handedly invented. What’s new? A lot. As CNN said, “While most business gurus milk the same mantra for all its worth, the one-man brand called Tom Peters is still reinventing himself.” His most recent effort is The Excellence Dividend: Meeting the Tech Tide with Work that Wows and Jobs that Last (Vintage, 2018). Tom’s bedrock belief: “Execution is strategy—it’s all about the people and the doing, not the talking and the theory.” In November 2017, Tom received the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award. ###