Liberation Management

by Tom Peters and Tom Peter

Book Overview

In the new economy, hierarchical business structures are being consigned to the shredder and replaced with flexible, fast-responding, ad hoc groups of brainworkers. Tom Peters, author of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394559991
• ISBN13: 9780394559995
• Release Date: November 1992
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 33 Pages
• Weight: 3.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.1" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Ahead of it's time

I liked "In Search of Excellence" but thought the concepts ( & certainly companies) didn't stand the test of time. I read "Liberation Management" with some trepidation.My initial reaction on this book was, "Tom's gone off the deep end, he's doing this just to be provocative" - that's a good enough reason to read this book, but I wouldn't have rated it well just based on that.If you look at today's business environment, he really wasn't a radical. Ideas that he plugged (Turn all work into a project, outsource, turn everything into a profit center) don't really seem so crazy. His mantra of speed certainly fit the period we just went through. His companies (example: EDS) even did better than prior books.I've read all of Tom's books - if you want one to guide how you manage and lead, this one is it...

Well before its time.

A fantastic book with mind-blowing detail and scope. Introduces (and complements with research!) many of the important 'management' topics that have gained popularity in the last few years. Which is impressive considering the book was written 8 years ago!Topics include: Network Organisations and other non-hierarchy-based organizational models, Networked Markets, Knowledge Management, reduced 'mass'-marketing, etc, etc, etc...It's impressive that he has been able to capture many of these trends BEFORE the proliferation of the World Wide Web.Also preempts some of his own more recent movements, like the plain-English movement and the Wow! Project movement that advocate categorization in terms of 'wow!' and 'yuck' projects.His latest '50List' books are much more digestible and prescriptive - if that is what you prefer.

In search of curious behavior

Tom Peters tells us that he can boil his entire management philosophy down to one sentence: "Crazy times call for crazy organizations." The new marketplace in one word is "fashion." Every market is becoming a fashion market. "That means: fickle, fleeting, ephemeral, faddish, and unfair." Peters says you can thrive in the marketplace if you'll: "Free the human imagination . . . Get close to and serve the customer. . . Customize products and services . . . Abandon everything; continuously reinvent yourself.. .Access the brainware around you. . . Know the front line . . . Demolish the monolith. . . Create teams that allow people to express their personalities."Peters says a corporation today must be "curious." Don't expect the personnel in the personnel department to hire curious people. Peters says HR people operate by this unwritten rule: "Thou shalt not hire a person who has an unexplained nanosecond in their life past the age of three." They want the person who maintained a 4.0 grade average through graduate school and "has not had an interesting thought in their entire life." They don't want any people who drop out of college, spend a year and a half in Europe, and offer no explanation. That, says Peters, is just the kind of behavior to look for when you're ready to hire curious people. He adds: "Hire a few genuine off-the-wall types. Collect weirdoes." Peters says he is totally serious about this: "This is coldly logical stuff." Nobody disagrees that markets are weird, "but how are you going to conquer weird markets with stuffed shirts?"

Tom Peters' most thoughtful and insightful book!

This is a stimulating and broad ranging discussion of developing trends in business and organization, focusing on the rate and nature of change and the evolving nature of markets and technology world-wide, liberating people from the constraints of traditional industrial organizational structure. This book is, in our opinion, Peters' most thoughtful and insightful book. Reviewed by Gerry Stern, author of Stern's SourceFinder Master Management Information Directory and Stern's CyberSpace SourceFinder.

Peters is in tune with the times

As the writings of Tom Peters have moved away from the structured management style of "In Search of Excellence" to the disorienting postmod style of "Liberation Management" and "The Pursuit of WOW!", many of the conventional business book reviewers are baffled. Some have even hinted that Tom Peters has gone crazy. Quite the contrary, I find the more recent work -- particularly Liberation Management -- exhilarating reading, very much in tune with the fragmented, hyperreal conditions of today. In particular, I have found the various case studies and examples in Liberation Management very useful in may work as a strategy consultant, researcher, and professor