A Passion for Excellence [antikvár]

Foreword Perhaps five million people have bought copies of In Search of Excellence, including its fifteen translations, since its publication in mid-Octo-ber 1982. If history is any guide, two or three million probably opened the book. Four or five hundred thousand read as much as four or five chapters. A hundred thousand or so read it cover to cover. Twenty-five thousand took notes. Five thousand took detailed notes. (Not all of this is speculation. After his many speaking presentations, Tom is regularly asked to sign books. The number with bent pages and heavy underlining is dispiritingly low.) In the Introduction we will argue that a revolution is on, that managers in every field are rethinking the tried and, as it turns out, not so true management principles that have often served their institutions poorly. At the heart of revolutions, historically, there have been no more than a handful of people. Perhaps among them today are those five thousand who have underlined key points in In Search of Excellence. But now it's time to enter another phase. The zeal to do something is clear. Video and audio cassettes on the new wave overwhelm the mind and the ad pages of airline magazines. A thousand seminars, all describing radically different approaches to managing, are in the air for the first time in memory. We ourselves have given hundreds of speeches and conducted almost five hundred seminars since 1982. Perhaps a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand people have gone through them. But the question remains: Who's doing much of anything differently? And that's not even the most important question. The most important is: How many have sustained the new "it"? In Search of Excellence disgorged no magic: it simply said, Stay close to your customers; wander around. The