The Little Big Things - 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence, by Tom Peters

Ah, self-help books. Some (well, most, really) are bad. A long time ago I read Covey’s Seven Habits…and found it…well, I don’t really remember. I’ll re-read it I suppose. I also picked up a copy of Getting Things Done, by David Allen and found that to be a mere echo of what I was already doing (lists!). Back in my days at Haarmann & Reimer, a German-based flavor and fragrance company now merged with Dragoco, another f&f company based also out of Holzminden, Germany, and renamed Symrise, one of the big bosses gave me a copy of Tom Peters’ The Pursuit of Wow! It was great. This book is not too dissimilar. Peters leans on the “soft” side of organizational things. Heavy emphasis on “thank you” notes and managing by walking around and being a people-person. He gives examples of practical ways to be better at these things. The structure of the book, while probably off-putting to a lot of people, I found to be a welcome distraction and probably contributed to my ability to read the whole thing. He changes font size, bolds text, has anecdotal stuff in boxes, one word sentences taking up entire lines, and so forth. Like I said, it won’t be for everyone. I read this in the bathroom – Peters won’t mind, he suggests that you do it. Cheers.