By: Anonymous In Search of Excellence was the 1982 best-selling look at excellent companies and an attempt to identify the attributes they had in common that helped to make them successful. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman studied dozens of American companies and deemed these companies to be excellent: Bechtel, Boeing, Caterpillar, Dana, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett-Packard, Delta, Fluor, IBM, Procter and Gamble, McDonalds, 3M, Digital Equipment and Emerson Electric. The book gives many anecdotes describing incidents of unusual efforts by employees, contributing to long-term financial performance and growth.