Tom Peters has an MBA and a PhD from Stanford Business School and is a leading author in the field of business management practice. He worked in management consultancy at the renowned McKinsey & Company before becoming an independent force in the field at the beginning of the 1980s.

The British Department of Trade and Industry honoured him as one of the world’s ‘Quality Gurus’ in 1990, and he received an honorary doctorate from Moscow’s State University of Management in 2004. Tom Peters is regarded as one of the best of the best management thinkers alive today.

His book, ‘In Search of Excellence’, was co-written with colleague Robert H Waterman Jnr and published in 1982. It is something of a bible for management thinkers and became the best selling management book of the last century, selling several million copies in its first four years on the shelf. The book devotes one chapter to each of eight themes that Peters and Waterman believed to be responsible for the success of leading organisations.

One of the core principles within ‘In Search for Excellence’ was the belief that empowering decision makers at different levels of an organisation is vital to solving business problems.

Empowerment is an absolute key topic in management training courses today, and has certainly been influenced by the work of Tom J Peters.