Biography

Tom Peters was born in Baltimore and completed his BA at Cornell before serving in the US Navy in the Vietnam War. He became a management consultant while completing as MBA at Stanford.

In 1973 he joined the US Government Office of Management and Budget at executive level, specialising in drug abuse. Two years later he joined McKinsey and Co as a management consultant, where he established a reputation as a writer and speaker. He promoted ideas developed with his colleague Robert H Waterman jnr, and the result was the best-selling book In Search of Excellence (1982).

The book argued that there were very few excellent companies, but they had found 12. They used their case studies to underscore several items of clear advice to executives. Within five years Peters had produced another book, Thriving on Chaos, in which the message was "forget the first book" because the companies in question weren't excellent any longer.

His distinct contribution is lifting the presentation of management lectures into a new dramatic form.

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