Born in Baltimore in 1942 with a lacrosse stick in one hand and oars over my shoulder, Peters resided in California, mainly Silicon Valley (where he was on a list of 100 most powerful people in Silicon Valley), from 1965–2000. Today, Peters and his wife Susan Sargent live on a 1,600-acre working farm, always under construction, in Vermont. His two stepsons, Max and Ben Cooper, are busy changing the world in Telluride and Brooklyn respectively.

Peters is a civil engineering graduate of Cornell (B.C.E., M.C.E.), where he is included in the book The 100 Most Notable Cornellians and earned an MBA and Ph.D. in business at Stanford; he holds honorary doctorates from institutions that range from the University of San Francisco to the State University of Management in Moscow—and has been honored by dozens of associations in content areas such as management, leadership, quality, human resources, customer service, innovation, marketing, and design. In the U.S. Navy from 1966–1970, he made two deployments to Vietnam (as a combat engineer in the fabled 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 in 1979; he also co-founded McKinseys now gargantuan Organization Effectiveness practice. Peters chief avocations are brushcutting in the summer, hiking in New Zealand in the winter, reading history books by the hundredweight, collecting weird friends, talking to cab drivers, visiting Venice and racing George Clooney in accumulating frequent flyer miles.