You can find the video in the right-hand column of this page or watch it at YouTube (time: 2 minutes 3 seconds). Or, get a PDF transcript of the video's content: Strategy: Measure Innovation.

Part 4 introduces Tom's conviction that encouraging your people to make friends in other functions of the organization should be a top priority. Tom says you should reward such behavior, make it an agenda item. Download Part 4 of Tom's Mother of All Presentations, and learn how and why cross-functional socialization (read, idea-sharing) is essential to business excellence.

This is obviously not the ideal way to cultivate a talented workforce. The education system in the United States still seems to be attempting to churn out well-behaved factory workers. With the enormous pressure placed on teachers to produce sufficient test results, the classroom becomes more about test preparation than exploration and discovery. Albert Einstein, long since deceased, had this to say:

"It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry."

We recently heard from Matt Lintner, a teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia. He sent Tom his reflections on what children are learning, and not learning, in school in a piece he titled "Race to Nowhere." Tom asked Matt if we could share his thoughts with you, and Matt kindly agreed. We urge you to take a moment, read what Matt has to say, and think about what you can do to help our youth learn what truly matters. Please, fan the flames of their curiosity.

Race to Nowhere

Management guru Peter Drucker famously said, "What gets measured gets managed." But what if we're measuring the wrong things? Consider the following: you can graduate from high school with straight A's without ever having:

1. Searched for answers to unknown questions.
2. Budgeted your own time.
3. Discovered what most interests you.
4. Initiated a project requiring sustained commitment.
5. Taken risks or experienced failure.
6. Led a team in the pursuit of a worthy goal.
7. Practiced consensus building or the messiness of compromise.
8. Asserted yourself, even if it meant challenging authority.
9. Built something of value.
10. Created art that speaks to the soul.
11. Explored the natural world.
12. Interacted with people outside your age group.
13. Volunteered substantively in your community.
14. Apprenticed in fields of your choosing.
15. Started a business.
16. Traveled and gathered perspectives outside your comfort zone.
17. Acquired practical skills like saving and investing, handling tools, programming, growing food...

Perhaps most tellingly, you never learned to say "No."

America can continue down the path of national standards, high stakes testing, longer school days, expanded calendar, merit pay, and all the rest—but none of it will cure what ills us if we're not focused on what truly matters.

Matt Lintner

Teacher

Fairfax County, VA

I was asked to contribute (a very few words) to a family page offering words of wisdom to a graduating high school senior. That's a serious challenge—and I literally spent days on the task. Here, for better or for worse, is the result:

Rules For Living Life to the Hilt

Nothing will turn out the way you thought it would.

There is no bigger waste of time than making plans.

Any success you have will be the byproduct of having thrown yourself headlong and without reserve into what you were most passionate about—and then ridden the wave you created wherever and at whatever speed it carries you.

The greatest long term satisfaction comes from having behaved at all times with common decency.

(Above: School starts next week in New Zealand. A bit of holiday cricket on the sandy Tasman Sea beach in front of our cottage.)

Erika Andersen wrote a kind review of the site at Forbes.com that we think you'll enjoy reading. She talks about her first encounter with Tom through In Search of Excellence, and describes him as a "tribal elder." As 2012 marks 30 years since In Search was published, perhaps that moniker is apt.

What's Part 3 all about? Given that worker satisfaction in the job is intricately tied to worker satisfaction with their supervisor, Tom sees selecting, training, and nurturing your first-line supervisors as a mandatory strategic part of business practice. I put it mildly. Download Part 3 of Tom's Mother of All Presentations to get his take—that is, care of first-line supervisors should be an obsession.

And all yours, no strings attached, to be used as you wish and released by us at the rate of one part every two weeks until more or less the end of 2012.

The special bit is the "extreme annotation." We estimate 100,000++ words of annotation accompany the standard slides. The notion is that each of the 23 parts will be in effect a book—the story, or 23 stories, is intended to stand alone without further interpretation needed. (Annotations are also produced as slides, since our experience is that few pay attention to the standard indirect notes feature—and pay attention is what we hope you'll do.)

Why this format you may ask.
The answer in short: I do slides.

I have given somewhat more than 2,500 presentations (in 67 countries) on "this excellence stuff" since we began our initial organization effectiveness research at McKinsey in 1977. I've illustrated my presentations with "overheads" and glass-mounted slides—and, for the last 15 or so years, with PowerPoint creations. The slide is my unit of measure, my sub-atomic particle if you will; and since MOAP/excellencenow.com is some form of "summa," the slide format is fitting.

The 23-part presentation is, I believe, a coherent narrative, with a plotline that goes more or less from the alpha to the omega of my work. But, more practically, it is a reference encyclopedia of sorts. My goal is grand theft—that is, your grand theft of my material. This is "the stuff I care about" and the stuff to which I have, effectively, given my life. And I want to share as much of it as I can—all of it in fact. And hope that as you read through or skim the material, you'll find items or streams of thought that are of value.

I could go on, but for once I won't.
Excellence.
Now.
Have at it ....

(Below: Some have a fruit bowls on their desk. Some of us, traveling idea salesmen like me, adorn our desk with a bowl of plug adapters.)

[Special thanks to Joy Stauber for designing the new site, and to our friends at House of Pretty for bringing it to life.]

PowerPoint

2 Things
3 Things
19Es
Excellence 25
Excellence Is the Next 5 Minutes
Ready. Fire! Aim.
What You Do
WTTMSW

Word

The Five Most Important Words
Adaptive Organizations
EXCELLENCE
The Have You 50
Memories That Matter
REALLY First Things
The Recession 46

Tom and everyone at tompeters.com wish you a Merry Christmas.

You can find the video in the right-hand column of our front page, or watch it here (time: 2 minutes 45 seconds). Also, you can get a PDF transcript of the video's content: Service: Invest in Your People.