Success Quote by Tom Peters

Tom Peters is doing what he’s always done best: turning a management platitude into a provocation that’s hard to ignore. “Design” here isn’t a tasteful logo or a late-stage polish pass. It’s shorthand for the total experience a company inflicts on people: how products behave, how services feel, how emails read, how policies land, how long you’re left on hold. By insisting it belong “on the agenda of every meeting in every single department,” Peters is attacking the most entrenched corporate reflex of all: treating design as a specialty function that shows up after the “real work” is done.

The line works because it reframes design as governance, not decoration. Agendas signal power. If something isn’t on the agenda, it’s optional, someone else’s problem, safe to defer. Peters is arguing that the cumulative “small” decisions made in finance, legal, HR, ops, and customer support are design decisions whether anyone claims them or not. The subtext is slightly accusatory: you’re already designing outcomes; you’re just doing it unconsciously, and customers are paying the price.

Context matters. Peters came up in the post-1980s quality revolution and the later obsession with “excellence,” when American firms were jolted by Japanese manufacturing discipline and then by a marketplace where features were quickly copied. Design became the moat: differentiation through usability, coherence, and trust. His demand is cultural, not procedural. Put design everywhere, and you force every department to answer a question most organizations dodge: what are we making people feel, and is that feeling deliberate?