Read The Cover

"There are no excellent companies." So begins Tom Peters's radical new "handbook for management revolution" --with a manifesto whose urgent message is that in our changed and now endlessly changing world, excellence must go hand in hand with a new imperative: flexibility.

Peters's previous books...described the parameters of corporate success in a relatively stable and predictable world. That world, he now argues, no longer exists. Instead, everywhere and every day managers confront shattering and accelerating change, change paced by constant innovations in computer and telecommunications technologies. They confront a chaotic new world in which new competitors spring up overnight and old ones disappear as companies merge and "de-merge" and this year's touted start-ups become next year's failures--all within the context of a tangled global financial network where the values of currencies and commodities may rise or fall 5 percent per week and 50 percent per year. In such a world, Peters maintains, merely aspire to be excellent  will prove disastrous; the only winning companies will be constantly adapting ones--organizations that are able not only to respond quickly to shifting circumstances but to proactively take advantage of them, continually creating new market niches and adding new value (quality) to their products and services in response to the ever-shifting desires of their customers.

....Thriving on Chaos is the essential guide to this revolution.