In the fall of 1980, Peters was on a tear, with speeches scheduled nearly every day. Word about the excellent companies was out, and Peters was flying all over the place in an effort to keep up with response. Then, one Sunday night in November, he found himself in the hospital with a severely injured Achilles tendon, several cracked ribs, and a dislocated shoulder -- the result of a car accident. For the next two weeks, he had plenty of time to think about what he was going to do with his life. "It was mid-life crisis time," he says, only half joking.
He realized that he had been tired and under enormous stress, that it was time to slow down. It was time to write the book. In order to develop the book's theoretical base, he had to go back to motivational theory he had not looked at since he was in graduate school. He surrounded his hospital bed with "eighty-seven hundred books" and read.
By the time he left the hospital, Peters was ready to start drafting the book. He and Waterman had already put together a summary of their findings for McKinsey, a 120-page report that became known as "The Orange Book," for the color of its cover. With this report in hand, Peters thought that drafting the book would be "a piece of cake."
He was wrong. He spent months sifting through the material. At times, he admits, he himself wondered whether the information was really common sense degenerated into trivia, but he plugged on. He passed his outpouring to Waterman, who went through it chapter by chapter then passed it back.
The draft went back and forth between Peters and Waterman and a McKinsey research librarian, Jennifer Futernick, and it ultimately was sent to an editor, John Cox. It was handed to Harper & Row in January 1982.
That spring, the co-authors parted ways. Waterman stayed on as a director at McKinsey, but Peters left to set up Palo Alto Consulting Center. McKinsey had been a good platform, and its reputation had provided access to some of the world's best-run companies, but Peters really was not comfortable there. Moreover, he felt ready to go out on his own. He decided to focus his consulting practice on what he loosely called helping companies achieve, rekindle, or maintain corporate excellence.
Meanwhile, Harper & Row was preparing to bring out the book. The publishing house liked it well enough, but it was management theory, after all, not a category that sold particularly well. A first run of 15,000 copies was planned for the fall of 1982.
The book appeared on time, with little fanfare. Almost at once, it was clear that Harper & Row had miscalculated. The first printing sold out in just a few weeks, well before Christmas. The second and third printings went as quickly as the first, and word about the book began to spread through corporate skunk works across thecountry.
As the book climbed the best-seller list, the pace grew even more frenetic. Harper & Row signed up Peters and Waterman for a seven-city, 10-day, book promotional tour. Then each went out alone to do eight more cities. There were radio shows and morning TV shows, book signings and interviews with local newspapers. Like a gambler on a roll, Peters wanted to do it all. He started placing private bets that In Search of Excellence would not make it to the top. He told a class he teaches at Stanford that, if it did, he would never wear a tie again. And every Wednesday he would rush down to the local bookstore to check the book's progress in The New York Times Book Review.
Meanwhile, his office, the little white frame house in Palo Alto, served as Peters' personal skunk-works clubhouse. A radio played music. There was beer in the refrigerator. Against one wall stood a roll-top desk he has had since he was eight. Against another was a seven-foot, papier mache statue of an old man in a sleeveless undershirt, shorts, and tennis shoes. Now and then, a cat walked across everybody's papers. The place was chaotic, but Peters could relax there, and he never had to wear a tie. Somehow everything important seemed to get accomplished.
By the third week in April, Peters got the news that In Search of Excellence was going to be # 1. More than 340,000 copies of the book had been sold, and the people who had bought them kept calling and writing. Meanwhile, Peters himself kept on the move. At 6:30 that Monday morning, he was driving to Monterey in his yellow VW Rabbit convertible for a presentation to the senior personnel managers from Syntex Corp., the pharmaceutical company. At noon, he was heading back to Palo Alto in time to receive the Eastern Onion singing telegram from Harper & Row and to talk to someone about possible TV or film treatments of the book. He went home for dinner, but by 11:30 that night he was on his way to San Francisco airport for a night flight to Chicago, where he was giving a speech to the senior partners of Touche Ross & Co.
Wherever he goes, people want to talk to him and tell him stories about skunk works and champions in their own companies. They ask him serious questions: How does a company not blessed with the eight attributes of excellence develop them? "That's the next book," says Peters. The key component, he says, seems to be the presence of "a persistent son-of-a-gun who hammered on the theme over and over -- someone like Andy Pearson at PepsiCo" or Willard Marriott Sr.
And if the company doesn't have a Pearson or a Marriott?.
"I don't know."
Mainly, however, Peters answers questions with more questions. As he does, one of the key differences between this and other theories becomes apparent. This theory is consciously question-raising rather than answer-giving. Rather than new structures or strategies for the '80s, it offers patterns, habits of questioning, and the perception that the answers to business questions are found the same way as the answers to other kinds of questions, by thinking and feeling one's way into a situation. It marks a new earnestness in American business, a new emphasis on old-fashioned values like respect for people, product quality, and serving the customer well. It is truly radical, yet some people have known it all along.
