Box 5.4 Peters and Waterman’s basic practices of excellently managed companies

In this book Peters and Waterman described the characteristics that seemed common to ‘excellent’ US companies (Box 5.4). Their work was based on forty-three firms that had remained in the top half of their industries in terms of growth and profitability over a twenty-year period. Evidence on the characteristics of the firms which were claimed to account for their excellence seems to have been gathered mainly through interviews with some of the firms’ managers and more generally from the authors’ consulting experience.