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•120 The 100 Greatest Business Ideas of All Time

friends are different. They just don’t understand why every customer cannot
get personalised service, even in the potato chip business.’
• Autonomy and entrepreneurship. The excellent companies nurture such a cul-
ture throughout the workforce.
• Productivity through people. Here it is again. Peters and Waterman quote a GM
worker laid off after 16 years making Pontiacs: ‘I guess I was laid off because I
made poor quality cars. But in 16 years, not once was I ever asked for a sug-
gestion as to how to do my job better. Not once.’
• Hands-on value driven. The authors believe that the role of the CEO is to
manage the values of the company. Executives in the excellent companies are
not people who hire assistants to get things done, but are right there with their
sleeves rolled up making things happen.
• Stick to the knitting. The successful companies are totally focused on what they
have become good at and do not allow themselves ever to be distracted.
• Simple form, lean staff. They write ‘One of the key attributes of the excellent
companies is that they have realised the importance of keeping things simple
despite overwhelming genuine pressures to complicate things.’
• Simultaneous loose–tight properties. This is probably the most difficult lesson to
implement or even really understand. It started a lot of hares with people
coming afterwards trying to put meat on these bones. Just how do you become
loose and tight at the same time? How are managers controlled and empow-
ered? How do you overcome the paradox of being big yet small?

What then is their legacy? The fame and success of the book spawned lots more
academic and practical research and writing on the topics they discussed. The fact
that so many of their excellent companies fell from grace should not stop us using
their attributes at the time of their success as a template for excellence.