Tom Peters

com, 1998).
             The Department of Trade and Industry (Business.com, 1998), describes the following twelve traits identified by Peters as shared by top companies in their quality improvement programs:.
             1. Leadership is obsessed with quality - the commitment to strive toward excellence, not just good work.
             2. Passionate systems - Peters believes that passion can motivate people but not without a system that nurtures and supports it.
             3. Ability to define and measure quality - in order to determine successes from failures you must have a mechanism for defining and measuring quality and the participants should administer this measurement.
             4. Quality must be rewarded - incentive compensation for quality work.
             5. Training - everyone must be trained to ensure quality.
             6. Multi-functional teams - multi-disciplined teams by whatever name, Quality Circles, cross-functional business teams, etc., should be introduced and empowered to drive improvement and solve business issues.
             7. No such thing as Small - any change is significant, no matter how small.
             8. Change = Variety - creating a variety of changes in the workplace keeps the employees interested and refreshed. New themes, new goals, new events are the antidote for stagnation.
             9. An organizational structure devoted to quality improvement - develop a structure that facilitates progress and success.
             10. Involve everyone - get everyone, from suppliers to the consumer, involved in the quality improvement process. Gaps in the process can be readily recognized.
             11. Improved quality reduces costs - Quality improvement can be a primary source of cost reduction. The elementary force at work is "simplification".
             12. Quality improvement is a never-ending journey - Each day, each product is getting relatively better or worse, but never stands still.
             Tom's theory of motivation comes from what he calls the "New World of Work" which is the shift to the information age from the production era.