Success Quote by Tom Peters

Tom Peters is doing something sly here: he dresses up an ethical demand as a “magic formula,” borrowing the language of business hacks to smuggle in a human one. The phrase flatters the profit motive while quietly indicting the default setting of corporate life, where customers get processed and employees get managed. Calling customers “guests” doesn’t just mean better service; it reframes the transaction as hospitality, a relationship governed by care, attention, and a bit of pride. You don’t “handle” a guest. You anticipate them. You notice small discomforts. You take responsibility when something goes wrong.

Then Peters twists the knife with “employees like people,” a line that lands because it’s absurdly basic and still radical in many workplaces. It implies that businesses routinely treat employees as something else: costs, headcount, “resources.” The subtext is that companies obsess over customer experience while starving the internal conditions that make good experience possible. Hospitality on the outside, indignity on the inside is a common corporate hypocrisy, and Peters is calling it out without sounding like a labor organizer.

Context matters: Peters rose to fame in the management-guru era when American companies were panicking about quality and culture, especially under pressure from Japanese manufacturing and a shifting service economy. His intent is pragmatic evangelism: if you want loyalty, creativity, and resilience, stop acting like humans are variables. Make dignity operational.