The Peters/Nordström combination promises to provide a heady cocktail for what will be a large and lively audience. Event details can be found on benchmarkforbusiness.com, or email us at team@tompeters.co.uk if you have any other questions about the day. We hope you can join us!

First, you can learn more about Future Shape of the Winner™ and how you can apply its principles in your own situation at a free Webinar, on Thursday, 6 March 2008, once at 12.00 midday GMT and once at 12 midday EST. During this one-hour web presentation, the team at TPC!UK will explain how FSW can help you deal with some typical dilemmas facing business today, tell you how to begin applying the basic FSW principles in your business, and outline next steps for those who want to go further. For information and registration, go to tompeters.co.uk.

Second, the Brand You road trip is back in progress! The next stop on the tour is Dallas, where Tom Peters Company, U.S., will team with Southern Methodist University to bring you the Brand You™: Inspired Performance workshop, on Monday, 31 March 2008. Sign up to learn why all your employees should be Brand Yous. That is, talented people dedicated to achieving excellence, who improve your brand while enhancing their own. For information and registration, go to www.cox.smu.edu.

On taking ownership:
Madeleine McGrath: "A client of ours pulled off a remarkable PSF transformation by positioning his management team of a business unit as a Professional Service to the organisation. He launched the initiative by calculating the gross cost of employment of the 12 person team (a few miilion UK pounds!) and asking if they felt they could justify the value that they added. There was a tense moment or two at the event, but from that point onwards we noticed a shift in the team's mindset. We went on to reframe their work agenda to transform the ownership that they had of what the unit was attempting to achieve."

On selecting clients carefully:
Mike Neiss: "A psf doesn't 'sell stuff' to a client, they join them in a partnership to do great things. And just like external knowledge workers, an internal psf is only as good as their last client. So when you find a turned on, gets it, passionate client, coddle them with fantastic results. You really need to see your "brand" as an extension of the clients. As an external provider, it does take some real thought and quite frankly, courage, to turn down a client. Cash flow does matter! And internally, it is very difficult to turn down a request. However.....it doesn't mean you have to provide WOW in equal measures. As an external consultant, we have to have faith that a remarkable engagement with a cool client will lead to lots of business by word of mouth. And likely to clients that are also cool. Internally, positive press regarding your best client's results will do the same. You don't get cash, you get political currency!"

This is based on Tom's PSF 50List, so there are plenty of topics to cover under the PSF umbrella. Let us hear your stories. Simply click Edit Page at the top of the page to which you'd like to contribute. The password/invite key is tompeters. See you there!

We rose to the challenge. Please join the fray by going to tompeters-psf.pbwiki.com and adding your own insights or stories. In order to contribute to the wiki, choose a page of interest, click "Edit Page" and enter the password tompeters.

We'd love to hear from you, either on the topic of PSF at the wiki, or with other ideas about things you'd like to see us implement here at tompeters.com.

And now, exactly 25 years later, Tom is still out on the road, "spreading the word" about "MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around," "A Bias for Action," and other more or less eternal truths. On this 25th anniversary to the day, Tom is making the 10,000-plus-mile trip to Seoul, where he will present, along with General Powell and the President of Korea, among others, at a major event aimed at vaulting Korea's innovation skills to another level.

Happy Anniversary! to Tom and In Search of Excellence.

That's Leadership, Talent, Trends, and Design, appearing this week in Taiwan. The publisher is Commonwealth Publishing Group, and we'd like to thank them for making available Tom's (and let's not forget that Marti coauthored Trends) Essentials Series.

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Our intention with these changes is to facilitate conversation. We love experimenting and we're open to your feedback.

Dear _____, I am at an uncharacteristic loss for words. Hence, I don't know what to say other than "Thank you." As we both know, the war is a contentious issue here in the Homeland. Many think we must indeed stay the course; at least as many think the war is a reckless, counterproductive disaster.

Well, history is my hobby, and there is nothing new under the sun. On 4 July 1776, the majority of our Colonist forebears thought war with Great Britain was sheer madness. And so it has been ever since. Civil War proponents and opponents, North and South, were about evenly divided—and insanely passionate about their respective views. In WWI, Wilson was seen as a madman. In the "obvious" WWII where the stakes were "clear," millions upon millions thought FDR was a mad warmonger. And we all know about "my war"—Vietnam. I was in I Corps-Danang for the 4th in 1966—while at Kent State just a couple of years later the level of disputatiousness rose to a point where domestic blood flowed, children's blood no less.

The Middle East is a godawful mess. We will argue for 100 years about the rightness or wrongness of the path we have chosen. But whether through diplomacy or arms, there must be some sort of resolution, most especially for the sake of your children and mine—that's always the point in the long run.

So thank you, from the bottom of my heart—especially on this special day. Your stunning sacrifice and willingness to voluntarily place yourself in Harm's Way is the price, alas, virtually every generation has borne to honor that tiny band of "insaniacs" (later called "Founding Fathers") who concluded on this date 231 years ago that their flavor of Freedom was important enough to merit David bearding Goliath—the odds of their success on 07.04.1776 were miniscule, the price of their almost certain failure, unspeakable.

Thank you, TJP