Tom, who is widely credited with almost single-handedly "inventing" the "management guru industry," now billions of dollars in size, writes, reflects, and then presents about 50 seminars each year, well over half outside the U.S. Tom estimates that since 1978, when the work on In Search of Excellence began, he’s given well over 2,500 speeches, spoken before almost three million people and presented in 63 countries.

When Tom and Bob Waterman produced In Search of Excellence over 25 years ago, they effectively introduced the world of business to the notion of Excellence per se, a state of mind and daily practice not normally associated with enterprise, and an inspiring and profitable aspiration at a time when America’s competitiveness was under full-blown assault.

In short, then and now, the unwavering pursuit of Excellence, from the finance department to after-sales service, in the car dealership and police department as well as the bank branch and aircraft factory, provides the basis for an unmatchable competitive advantage-and acts on one and all as an ongoing spur to path breaking achievement. And in our global village, getting flatter by the day as it is, Excellence is a universal idea/ideal that translates and transports across all borders.

In 1999, Search was honored by NPR as one of the "Top Three Business Books of the Century"-and ranked as the "greatest business book of all time" in a poll by Britain’s Bloomsbury Publishing. Tom followed Search with well over a dozen additional international bestsellers. Among them: A Passion for Excellence (with Nancy Austin); Thriving on Chaos; Liberation Management (acclaimed as the "Management Book of the Decade" for the ’90s); and the provocative, colorful Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age.

Along the way, several Tom Peters biographies have been published, including: Corporate Man to Corporate Skunk: The Tom Peters Phenomenon and Tom Peters: The Bestselling Prophet of the Management Revolution (part of a four-book series of business biographies on Peters, Bill Gates, Peter Drucker, and Warren Buffet).

Born in Baltimore in 1942 with a lacrosse stick in his hands, and residing in California (mainly Silicon Valley) from 1965-2000, Tom and his wife Susan Sargent now live on a 1,600-acre working farm, "always under construction," in Vermont. He is a civil engineering graduate of Cornell (B.C.E., M.C.E.) and earned an MBA and Ph.D. at Stanford; he holds honorary doctorates from institutions that range from the University of San Francisco to the State University of Management in Moscow.

In the U.S. Navy from 1966-1970, he made two deployments to Vietnam (as a combat engineer in the Navy Seabees) and "survived a tour in the Pentagon." He was a White House drug-abuse advisor in 1973-74, and then worked at McKinsey & Co. from 1974-1981, becoming a Partner and co-founder of the now gargantuan Organization Effectiveness practice in 1979.