Dispatches from the New World of Work

Summer Banner, Excellent Idea

For our summer banner (which went up two days early because the Solstice occurred on Sunday), we asked Joy Stauber, who has been designing our banners for a couple of years now, to think about Summer and Excellence. While Joy has been designing a seasonal banner every three months for tompeters.com, this time we asked her to also consider Excellence, for Excellence is what this site is all about. Of course it hearkens back to the book Tom co-authored with Bob Waterman. It's an idea that launched Tom's speaking career and also an idea that at some level overwhelmed Tom, so that he found himself shying away from it for a long while.

To quote Tom from an April, 2006 blog post:

I got so damn sick of "excellence," so worn out by "excellence" ... for years after "the book" became a hit. Distanced myself from it. Ran from it.

But no longer. Excellence is back in a big way. If you've looked at any of Tom's slide presentations lately, you'll see that the first slide always includes: "Excellence. Always."

When Joy began to think about Excellence (which hereafter will always be capitalized at this site) and images for a banner, she thought about the wheel, and when she thinks wheels, she thinks bikes. (As a fan of bicycles myself, I’m glad that the banner begins with a bike in motion.) Joy discovered the black and white spiral while exploring the Golden Mean, also known as the Golden Ratio, and she liked the energy of it. (Cathy's concern: "When you scroll down our front page, the black spiral seems to pulse in and out. I hope we don't cause any seizures.") Yes, we all here at tompeters.com hope we don't cause any seizures, either, unless you’re seized by an urge to sit bolt upright and realize that you can begin right now to always be Excellent.

Flowers are Excellent, of course, but especially this flamboyant one. (No meek and mild-mannered flowers here.) (Recall also that Tom suggests not cutting back on your flower budget even during this recession.) And what could be more Excellent than fresh-grown garden tomatoes? From the earth, pictured next. As for the star, isn't Excellent work always rewarded with a star? (Maybe not in real life, but certainly in school. But maybe real-life Excellence should be rewarded with stars, too?)

Joy likes to include a silhouetted character in her banners. You may or may not think it's Tom, flying a kite. (His hair has never been that long in our recollection.) Think Ben Franklin and the discovery of electricity, think wind power. The words in the speech balloon clearly are Tom's, part of his new clarion call, "If not EXCELLENCE, WHAT? If not EXCELLENCE now, WHEN? " After that, we move on to the sunset, our Excellent reward at the end of each day.

That's the lowdown behind the new Summer/Excellence banner.

With that, we here wish all of you a wonderful, warm, relaxing, and Excellent summer. (As always to our friends in the southern hemisphere, best wishes for an Excellent winter.)

Technical Difficulties

If you tried to visit our site yesterday, you may have noticed that we had a day-long outage. This is unusual for us and we were scrambling to fix the issue. Our thanks go out to our trusty hosting service, Joyent, for resolving it and getting us up and running again. We appreciate your patience.

Now Available on the Kindle

We're happy to announce that you can now subscribe to Tom's blog on the Kindle. We're still working out the kinks. For example, the graphics are not yet appearing, but we hope to have them up soon. The cost to subscribe is $1.99 USD per month. This amount is determined by the Kindle staff, we didn't have any input on that front. For those of you with iPhones, the Kindle app unfortunately does not yet allow subscriptions to periodicals or blogs. We'll let you know when that becomes available. Our thanks go out to all the readers who've expressed an interest in this as well as to David Vugteveen for very helpfully reporting back on performance. Enjoy!

Cheers, Jack!

I'll miss Jack Kemp! We became pretty good pals in the late 1980s. Silicon Valley was facing severe competition from Japan, as the car folks had before. And to my dismay, their response, like the car folks', was mostly whining. That is, they turned protectionist—led by such luminaries as Valley icon Bob (Intel) Noyce.

I became, from my perch in Palo Alto, a very loud and visible and annoying voice for free trade in the Valley—and made a friend of rabid freetrader Kemp. (I testified to Congress a few times to the irritation of many of my friends.) Thanks largely to Andy Grove's brave decision to change the playing field, the Valley retreated from the protectionist brink—there'd be no Valley as we know it today if the anti-traders had won; I'm sure of that.

In the midst of it, Bro Kemp and I did this, that, and the other together. Fact is, our official political party designations were opposites—but I loved being around the guy, we had fun with very serious stuff, and we were 100.00% in synch on trade.

[My favorite Kemp memory. I was on the Farm in Vermont—not my primary residence at the time. And the phone rang at dinnertime. This booming voice was on the other end. (Kemp could sound face to face, or on the phone, like the Bills quarterback he once was, barking signals in front of 50,000 people.) "Peters, damn it, you're harder to get hold of than George Bush (JK was Mr Bush I's HUD secretary at the time). I need you to get your butt down to D.C. ..." Needless to say, I scurried to Washington a couple of days later for some meeting or other on the Hill with Pals of Jack.]

New Video Page

You'll notice that there's a new item on our menu in the left column, Tom's Videos, etc. We're gathering many types of videos on this page. Some are available for purchase through vendors we trust, some are short, sweet, free, and downloadable. This page is currently a work in progress and we'll be adding much more to it in the near future, including an audio section.

Shuttering the WOW! Store

Today we've closed the WOW! Store. It was an area of our site where you could purchase Tom-related items like books, videos, or hats. Much of the merchandise that was available through the WOW! Store will still be available through other outlets. You can find Tom's books (for a complete list, visit our book page) through your favorite bookseller, and Tom's videos through Enterprise Media. If you're interested in things you don't have to pay for, check out our Free Stuff page, which is happily staying right where it is.

Potential Comment Delay

Those who comment here may have noticed a delay in the appearance of their comment. We're dealing with an especially heavy volume of spam comments and have been trying to adjust the filter settings. For those of you who subscribe to the comments feed via RSS, we apologize for the spam comments, most of which is pornographic, that are getting through the filter. If we set the filter too high, valid comments are caught in the filter, if it's set too low, the spam gets through. We appreciate your patience as we find the right balance.

Forewo/ard, March!

There will be a 2009 edition of Re-imagine! I was asked to write a new foreword—which I did. Finished it last Friday.

Following a rule I generally break, what follows is the first 800 words, with a continuation which you may choose to peruse. We also have a PDF version of the entire 7,000-word piece.

[Please keep in mind that the text is a draft, which Tom urged me to remind you. Changes, as always, are to come.—CM]

Preface to 2009 Edition: Re-imagine

Does any of what follows, in a book published in 2003, make sense if, or as, the world is falling apart? That's the obvious, and only, way to start a foreword in early 2009. The answer, of course, is "Yes"—and "no."

Re-imagine describes a brave new intertwined world of commerce, organizational formats, and career strategies in which many or even most of the old rules have been broken, then shredded. While the economic system is dramatically altered in 2009, and will surely be altered more in 2010 and perhaps beyond, the old rules that were broken that animated Re-imagine in the first place are still broken; much of the work to be done in 2009, beyond dealing with day-to-day survival issues, comes from the worklist we laid out in 2003—there is far more unfinished than finished business when it comes to readiness for unrelenting, global, speed-of-light 21st century marketplace competition.

Boundaries are disappearing—and, altered circumstances or not, neo-protectionism or not, we live in a global village; mindblowing new technologies are announced, it seems, by the day, from Apple's latest to the consequences of fullblown genetic mapping, and new members of the Vital Economy Club only enhance that reality. Most any task can be done anywhere. Alliances of every imaginable flavor are created, do their thing, and evaporate. Radical tools such as "crowdsourcing" change dynamics of work and human communication that are thousands of years old—and such tools continue, regardless of macro-economic circumstances, to arrive on the scene and grow like Topsy with startling regularity. And hence the race to add value to keep one's job, or to keep lots of jobs at home, or to enable a going concern, even a small one, to survive has only intensified.

Hierarchies are dying, at least in larger firms; and the economic situation accelerates that—lard in the superstructure is first on the chopping block, and not just at GM and Citi. We do most of our work via project teams that involve members from hither, thither and yon; and that last a year—or a week. Order shouting is out. These disparate team members from disparate places asked to concoct new stuff based on combining ideas of every description can only be motivated by persuasion and passion and the promise of personal growth, not the rattling of the hierarchical saber. "Who's in charge" varies by the day; Cisco Systems, the communication equipment giant, weathering the current storm by re-inventing itself once again, calls it an organization based on "emergent leadership"—the de facto leader of a critical team can emerge electronically in a literal flash from three levels down in the organization, by dint of her stellar electronic contributions made from a cramped cubicle or her bedroom at home at 3 a.m.

Those of us in the high wage nations, economic uncertainty, even chaos, not withstanding, will only survive by moving up the same "value-added" ladder described in the 2003 edition of this book—and by being prepared, as specified in 2003, for more or less constant re-invention. The rise of the likes of China and India and Brazil proceeds apace—and even with current hiccups, or the flu, the pace of these new major players' growth is nothing short of astounding—and will be more so if your time horizon moves out to, say, 15 years, a fact for readers under 40 or so. Yesterday is over is the ultimate truism, but at the moment more true, if possible, than at any time in the last 100 years.

There is a finance tsunami.
There is a generic economics tsunami.
There is a technology tsunami, just gathering a head of steam.
There is a geo-political tsunami, just gathering a head of steam.
There is a work-structuring tsunami.
There is an organization effectiveness tsunami.
There is a careers tsunami.

And they play out differently and in different combination every day.

So does this brief recitation of forces at work now, most of which were at work then, suggest that "I wouldn't change a word"?

Of course not!
I'd change a lot.
But probably in a direction you'd not expect.

Oddly, I'd look back, not forward, mostly, if I made major modifications. As on Wall Street, I'd pay attention, lots more attention, to the bed rock.
In fact, I beat myself up daily for not having done so before.
(Frankly, I'm irritated with anyone who isn't beating themselves up.)
Oddly on yet another dimension, my re-assessment began a year or so before the fissures in the financial system's understructure began to be visible.
I can even put an exact date on the start of my re-assessment.

April 14, 2006.

There were some very modest signs of Winter reluctantly giving way to Spring at home in Vermont. But my view that April 14th was 100% ice and snow as Air Siberia approached Novosibirsk, Siberia.

I was in Novosibirsk to lead a one-day seminar. I had been invited as even this outpost was beginning to integrate into the global economy, and local leaders were keen to hear new views of enterprise management in a universally competitive environment. Others may have been asked before me, but I was the first of my sort to make the journey to what was the most forbidden part of the world when I was a boy.

I thought, if the landscape didn't send a loud enough signal, "This is different, and requires a different approach." Not condescending—this city of scientists could turn out more IQ points in a room than any short of Cambridge MA or Palo Alto CA. Yet as I pondered my approach, somehow, as it rarely did, the past after all is the past, my mind wandered back to 1982 and In Search of Excellence, and the odd parallels to the changing scenery, economic and intellectual, from which the book emerged.

"Search," as my pals and I call it, was squarely aimed at a specific pair of challenges—a formidable U.S. competitor for the first time since the end of World War II, namely Japan; and a whopper of a recession that brought double-digit unemployment, soaring inflation and sky high interest rates to my country. But the book that was born, oddly and in many ways, was a "back to the future" tome.

From the late sixties, "strategy" and "the quantification of positively everything" were the king and crown prince at the B-schools, in the consultancies (such as my employer, prestigious McKinsey & Co.), and in the corporations themselves—this was pre-Jack Welch and his merciless focus on operational excellence, and the Giant Headquarters Strategy Corps of detached thinkers and modelers was home to the best and the brightest at what turned out to be a sagging GE.

"Get the strategy right, and the rest will take care of itself." In effect, that was the mantra—and the quantification of positively everything was the animating force; if it couldn't be reduced to and expressed in numbers, it wasn't worthy of consideration.

(Sound familiar, circa 2008-2009? More later.)

McKinsey's new boss, Ron Daniel, was troubled as he assessed the Firm's work product. He fretted about the almost total absence of emphasis on implementation, and asked me, a fresh-caught Stanford Ph.D. who'd worked on organizational effectiveness for the past five years, to "take a look around"—I was shortly joined by my Bob Waterman.

Fast forward a few months, and following a series of visits I made in the U.S. and Europe looking for those new ideas about the practice of management, and you'll find Bob and I on a road trip—black-suited McKinsey consultants to the core, quantitative credentials to die for (In my last normal assignment, I'd been working on oil-discovery simulation models, doing the Fortran programming myself). We left our San Francisco office one Spring morning in 1978 and journeyed a short 30 miles "down the Peninsula," to Palo Alto. We met there with HP president John Young.

The "Holy smokes" came fast, before we officially started for that matter. The president of a billion dollar or so company, characterized by its total commitment to sustaining innovativeness, shared a half-wall cubicle, about 8 feet by 8 feet, or 9X9, with his secretary. It was a long, long way, figuratively as well as literally, from the 15-foot (!) high doors at the entrance to the secretary's office guarding the CEO's office one floor up from us in the San Francisco tower where we worked for McKinsey. Said doors, on the 51st floor, belonged to the Big Boss of ... the Bank of America.* (*Some things never change, eh? B of A, on the dole, seeking more dole, implodes—at the same time in early 2009 HP announces far better than expected quarterly earnings.)

As the interview subsequently unspooled, John introduced Bob and me to a four-letter term that remains to this day the centerpiece of my work and philosophy.

Namely: MBWA.
Managing By Wandering Around.

It means what it sounds like—getting out and about, literally wandering around. But I've come to appreciate how much more it means than that, especially and ironically, given new communication tools, in 2009. MBWA is in its largest meaning a metaphor about being in touch and staying in touch with reality. Being in touch with the car you make—not just the numbers that surround making it.* (*The founder-CEO of a giant retailer told me about sitting next to Henry Ford at a White House dinner 20-odd years ago. He was, he said, "intimidated" by Ford's recounting tale after tale of visits with kings and presidents and prime ministers. He laughed as he said, "I woke up with a start in the middle of the night and thought, 'I sat next to Henry Ford for three hours, and he never once mentioned cars.'" To my mind, alas, decades later, that goes a long way toward explaining why the Ford I rented in New Zealand in late February 2009 was so obviously inferior to the Kia I rented for two weeks earlier in the month.) Being in touch with the people who do the work where the rubber meets the road.** (**I read another MBWA story recently, about U.S. Army General David Petraeus, as he attempted to clean up the mess in Iraq. On the wall of his office in the so-called "Green Zone" was a hand-done poster on which he'd lettered the cornerstones of his philosophy. At the top of the very short list was, in exceptionally large letters, "WALK." Get out of the compound, get out of the vehicle, get close to the neighborhoods you are trying to stabilize. "WALK!" It-"walk" has become the foundation and metaphor for a surprisingly successful turn-around in this insanely difficult situation.) Being in intimate touch with "the little things" ("little," my a#%) that make a product better or get in the way of fast approvals of this or that—the "real stuff" that determines success or failure, a job done or just talked about, excellence or mediocrity.

I thought a lot about MBWA as the sub-prime crisis escalated into global economic chaos, fully 30 years after the research for In Search of Excellence began. There's a lot to the current sorry story, to be sure, but I remembered with laserlike clarity a long ago comment from a seminar participant, Chairman of a mid-sized regional bank:

"Tom, let me tell you the definition of a good lending officer. After church on Sunday, on the way home with his family, he takes a little detour to drive by the factory he just lent money to. Doesn't go in or any such thing, just drives by and takes a look."

"Just drives by"—needs to take a look. At the tidiness, the orderliness. To see if anyone's in, beavering away after hours. Just to sniff, really, to blink in the language of Malcolm Gladwell. To, yes, tacitly stay in touch.

So MBWA is the opposite of abstractions and "models," the opposite of "by the numbers" management, the opposite of "strategy as the alpha and the omega." (And numbers can indeed lie, maybe even most of the time (?), as we learned from Enron and Worldcom and are in the seemingly endless process of relearning, painfully, from virtually all of our big banks and, of course, dear old Bernie Madoff.)

Time passed, and with a hundred or more interviews and a hundred or more presentations to test our findings under our belts, Bob and I and Harper & Row birthed In Search of Excellence in 1982. Yup, back to the future. Stuff your grandfather the shopkeeper knew:

People matter most.
Give people ample room to experiment and encourage them to grow.
Honor the front-line worker over the MBA. (Whoops, Bob and I were both Stanford MBAs.)
Listen until your ears turn red to your customers—and love 'em up day in and day out, from pre-dawn to the black of the night.
Try stuff in a flash, instead of talking and talking and talking it to death.
Don't let screw ups ruffle you, just try again—and skip the soul-sapping, time-devouring blame game.
Keep it simple, fight for simple—declare total war on your own bureaucracy, and put your best general in charge.
Lay out your guiding values, like Johnson & Johnson's fabled "Credo," values that'll make your employees and your children and your neighbors proud—and stick to them.
Walk. Walk the talk. Stay in touch. Practice MBWA Monday-through the Sunday "drive by."
And aim for Excellence in everything you do.*

(*Yup, it all could have been written 200 or 500 years earlier. I don't deny it.)

Now, as I prepared for my day-in-Siberia, all the above, except the sub-prime bits that were 18 months in the offing, came back with a rush. Was I going to give my standard, hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners speech about embracing the speed-of-light global village which now included Novosibirsk? Or was I going "back to the future"?

I did both. But I leaned toward the latter. Jeff Skilling (former Enron CEO) was a colleague for a while in my McKinsey days—and as I recall he reported to jail to begin serving a, gulp, 25-year sentence, at about the time I landed in Siberia. Jeff was bright as hell and then some, but got totally caught up in the numbers game and obviously went to any length to make the numbers dance to his tune. And the "any length" made a Godawful mess of maybe millions of lives—e.g., as million-dollar pension nest eggs, earned with 30 years' work, literally evaporated to absolute zero. He epitomized the extreme end of the scale of those who lived by the numbers, for the numbers, and of the numbers—and wouldn't have known MBWA if he/they tripped over it. He and his pals didn't see the real people, one-at-a-time, screwed by Enron's playing with the California electricity market. Jeff, in short, was the enemy and villain to all that Bob Waterman and I espoused.* (*Mea culpa: Bob and I could have written more about integrity and character than we did. My lame excuse is that our parents did a pretty good job, and we took it for granted. My mea culpa is that we should have known better and sounded off—it might not have helped, but it wouldn't have hurt. B-schools deafening silence on this issue, until long after the cat had escaped the bag, is shameful at the very least—a criminal act in its own way.)

With all this churning through my mind, I labored over the approach to my Siberian seminar. To set the tone, I resorted uncharacteristically to abstract language. But I wanted to lay down the gauntlet about the bedrock of organizational life and purpose and responsibility—and set the hurdle high. Here's what the keyboard produced, almost without my intervention. I've used it probably 100 times since April 2006:

Enterprise at its best is ... an emotional, vital, innovative, joyful, creative, entrepreneurial endeavor that elicits maximum concerted human potential in pursuit of Excellence and the wholehearted provision of service to others.

I throw today and threw in Siberia that gauntlet down and, while admitting that this state is hardly the norm, asked-ask:

What could possibly be the point of organized human endeavors if not something more or less like this? ** (**Fact is, we spend the majority of our adult waking hours as members of organizations. Hence, if said organizations short-change us on growth opportunities (the majority do in fact short-change their members) than we in deep trouble—as individuals and as a nation. You might well say that National Excellence is a direct product of the collective growth opportunities offered by organizations to their workforce. This is especially true in a global economy where national growth is measured in terms of collective adult individual growth.)

Perhaps surprisingly, most in my seminars, in Amsterdam or Abu Dhabi, eventually admit, many with delight, that this is, almost obviously, the ultimate aspiration of any organized activity. From this heavenly aspiration and unstinting endorsement of human growth, excellence and service, I move/moved to the achievement thereof, offering advice consistent with the logic and tools from the first edition to this book—but never, and this is the key, and the centerpiece of my work in 2009, allowing us (me, participants) to stray for a moment from the deeper purpose of "OHB" (organized human behavior).*** (***My friend and colleague Jim Collins coined the term "BHAG"—Big Hairy Audacious Goal. I love it! One of my clients was proud of his BHAG, about transforming an industry; it was indeed a stretch, and a big and bold one. But as we talked through "the Siberia message" about higher organization purpose, he literally scuttled the old BHAG. He in fact kept the industry goal intact, but the BHAG now focused on the "total commitment to extreme human growth" within his firm that would necessarily precede marketplace success.)

I could almost, with a straight face, call the Siberian experience an "epiphany." Confronted by the strangest environment I've ever encountered, I revived my rusting clarion call for Excellence, even took it up a notch or two or three from its 1982 incarnation—and insisted on nothing less than a Jeffersonian goal for any and all organizations and units within. And furthermore insisted that any lesser aspiration was almost shameful!

(Okay, drop the "... almost" from the prior sentence. Make it "... was shameful.")

But there was another epiphany of sorts to come.

Oddly, it was the Australian Institute of Management, in September 2007, which decided to present the first major tribute to the life's work of the late & great Peter Drucker—with the likes of Doris Drucker, 9X and easily as spry as someone 25 years younger, in attendance. I was asked to keynote an event featuring many of the luminaries in the field of management studies.

I was honored.
And non-plussed.

As I carefully re-read Drucker's work, I was struck anew, in fact for the first time, by his deeply held beliefs about the power of superior management to transform all of society for the better. Hence once again I was wont to dig more deeply than my norm. The conclusion, stealing in part from, not Drucker, but Robert Greenleaf, creator of the Servant Leader "movement," was:

"Organizations exist to serve. Period.

"Leaders live to serve. Period."

And once more, as in Siberia and to my surprise, that deep digging and Mr. Greenleaf, led me to observe my keyboard, almost without my assistance, arguing that organizations, all organizations, should be ...

"Passionate servant leaders, determined to create a legacy of earthshaking transformation in their domain (a 600 square-foot retail space, a 4-person training department, an urban school, a rural school, a city, a nation), create/must necessarily create organizations which are no less than Cathedrals in which the Full and Awesome Power of the Imagination and Spirit and Native Entrepreneurial Flair (We are all entrepreneurs—Muhammad Yunus, father of micro-lending and Nobel peace prize winner) of diverse individuals (100% Creative Talent—from checkout to lab, from Apple to Wegmans, the regional grocer judged to be America's '#1 Place to Work' in 2004, to Jane's one-person accountancy in Invercargill NZ) is unleashed in passionate pursuit of jointly perceived Soaring Purpose (= win a Nobel peace prize like Yunus, or at least do something worthy of bragging about 25 years from now to your grandkids) and Personal and Community and Client Service Excellence."

I'll admit that it's a prize-grabber when it comes to the run-on sentence category, but I am not willing to edit it—tested as it is now in over 100 presentations from Baltimore to Bucharest to Bologna. And, once again, I argue to my seminar participants, be they Canadian grocers or corporate security chiefs or Silicon Valley techies:

"If not this, what?"

In fact, as time passes I find myself less and less taken aback (at myself) for arguing "no less than Cathedrals in which the Full and Awesome Power of the Imagination and Spirit and Native Entrepreneurial Flair of diverse individuals." The idea in my mind is not religious, despite my use of the term "cathedral." The idea is that the first order of business is developing people—who will in turn go all out for our customers. Frankly, I'm doing no more than stealing from Hal Rosenbluth and Dave Liniger.

Hal took Rosenbluth International from local travel agency (Philadelphia) to global travel services giant, which he subsequently sold to American Express; his winning philosophy, based entirely on maximizing internal human development, was perfectly captured by his book Putting the Customer Second—put your people first, and you'll end up giving the best service possible to your clients. Dave has made miracles for decades at RE/MAX—and calls his firm "a life success company"; make your agents successful and they'll, in turn, go all out for their customers.

I also was inspired by one of what I call "the parable books," which usually leave me (very) cold. Against my better judgment I ended up forking over a few bucks at O'Hare for Matthew Kelly's The Dream Manager. The title bugs me, too—too soft for an old engineer like me. But he captured me in a flash with a simple but profoundly important observation: We all have dreams!

The next step of Kelly's is suggesting that if we devote ourselves, in an open and deliberate fashion, to helping people—e.g., the single mother trying to raise two kids on a receptionist salary—achieve their dreams—she'd die for a college degree—we will turn them into inspired employees. Kelly summarizes:

"A company's purpose is to become the-best-version-of-itself. The question is: What is an employee's purpose? Most would say, 'to help the company achieve its purpose'—but they would be wrong. That is certainly part of the employee's role, but an employee's primary purpose is to become the-best-version-of-himself or -herself. ... When a company forgets that it exists to serve customers, it quickly goes out of business. Our employees are our first customers, and our most important customers."

So in a thoroughly revised edition of this book, there would be a long section, like the one that appeared at the start of In Search of Excellence, that dealt with the basics of the purpose of enterprise, and the duties and obligations of managers. The Great Recession of 2008-2XXX has, one hopes, taught us (taught me!) not to take the bedrock for granted. I didn't in 1982; I did, like so many others, in 2003.

In the October 2008 Harvard Business Review, Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria offered us "It's Time To Make Management a True Profession." At one point the authors write, "Managers have lost dignity over the past decade in the face of wide spread institutional breakdown of trust and self-policing in business. To regain society's trust, we believe that business leaders must embrace a way of looking at their role that goes beyond their responsibility to the shareholders to include a civic and personal commitment to their duty as institutional custodians. In other words, it is time hat management became a profession."

I agree—and even the ultra-reserved Peter Drucker would, I suspect, have smiled delightedly at that formulation.

One book I've read during these troubled times has influenced me far more than any other. It's by Vanguard Mutual Fund Group founder John Bogle. His extraordinary and lasting success as an investor has flowed from always attending to the bedrock of an enterprise he chooses to support. He recently penned Enough: The Measures of Money, Business, and Life. I will simply share a sample of his chapter titles:

"Too Much Cost, Not Enough Value" ... "Too Much Speculation, Not Enough Investment" ... "Too Much Complexity, Not Enough Simplicity" ... "Too Much Counting, Not Enough Trust" ... "Too Much Business Conduct, Not Enough Professional Conduct" ... "Too Much Salesmanship, Not Enough Stewardship" ... "Too Much Focus on Things, Not Enough Focus on Commitment" ... "Too Many Twenty-first Century Values, Not Enough Eighteenth-Century Values" ... "Too Much 'Success,' Not Enough Character."

I can do no more than say "Amen."

So there's my story of the story of 2003-2009. Except for one final thing that I've implied throughout this Foreword but not been explicit enough about to this point. In a major revision of Re-imagine I would resurrect Excellence. Beginning in Siberia (14 April 2006, remember), I fell in love all over again with the idea and ideal of Excellence. To be quite honest, Excellence wore me out in the mid-eighties. (I'm not complaining!) But I have returned to the fold with a Vengeance.

Most of my presentations these days, and since mid-2006, are titled:

EXCELLENCE. ALWAYS.

And they invariably end with a slide that reads:

IF NOT EXCELLENCE, WHAT?
IF NOT EXCELLENCE NOW, WHEN?

In a recent exercise anticipating a presentation in New Zealand, my keyboard play resulted in a list that I called "The '19Es' of Excellence." Here they are:

Enthusiasm. (Be an irresistible force of nature!)
Energy. (Be fire! Light fires!)
Exuberance. (Vibrate—cause earthquakes!)
Execution. (Do it! Now! Get it done! Barriers are baloney! Excuses are for wimps! Accountability is gospel! Per football coach Bill Parcells: "Blame nobody! Expect nothing! Do something!")
Empowerment. (Respect and appreciation! Always ask, "What do you think?" Then: Listen! Liberate! Celebrate! 100% innovators or bust!)
Edginess. (Perpetually dancing at the frontier, and a little or a lot beyond.)
Enraged. (Determined to challenge & change the status quo!)
Engaged. (Addicted to MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around. In touch. Always.)
Electronic. (Partners with the world 60/60/24/7 via electronic community building and entanglement of every sort. Crowdsourcing power rules!)
Encompassing. (Relentlessly pursue diverse opinions—the more diversity the merrier! Diversity per se "works"!)
Emotion. (The alpha. The omega. The essence of leadership. The essence of sales. The essence of marketing. The essence. Period. Acknowledge it.)
Empathy. (Connect, connect, connect with others' reality and aspirations! "Walk in the other person's shoes"—until the soles have holes!)
Experience. (Life is theater! Make every activity-contact, inside the firm or out, memorable! Standard: "Insanely Great"/Steve Jobs; "Radically Thrilling"/BMW.)
Eliminate. (Keep it simple!)
Errorprone. (Ready! Fire! Aim! Try a lot of stuff and make a lot of booboos and then try some more stuff and make some more booboos—all of it at the speed of light!)
Evenhanded. (Straight as an arrow! Fair to a fault! Honest as Abe!)
Expectations. (Michelangelo: "The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." Amen!)
Eudaimonia. (Pursue the highest of human moral purpose—the core of Aristotle's philosophy. Be of service. Always.)
Excellence. (The only standard! Never an exception! Start now! No excuses! If not Excellence, what? If not Excellence now, when?)

The story goes that the senior Tom Watson, de facto founder of IBM, was once asked how long it takes to become excellent. He is said to have replied (three decades before the one-minute manager rode on to the scene), "a minute." Asked to explain, Watson apparently said, "It's simple. Make yourself a promise that starting right now you will not do anything in other than an excellent fashion."

As we deal with every variety of turbulence, the search for bedrock has never been so important. Make this your minute to declare for Excellence in all you do. I hope the following pages and ideas will help. And remember that it is the tough times, not the easy ones, which define a person professionally and personally. What better time for Excellence as a guiding star.

Tom Peters

Golden Bay
South Island
New Zealand

(Version 0305.09)

The End of TP Wire Service

We began the TP Wire Service as an experiment in February 2005 and went live that April. As we approach the four year mark, we've decided that it is time to pursue other experiments. We deeply appreciate the loyalty of our readers, but also understand that technologies have emerged that may be able to serve you as well as this wire service has. To all our community members that have suggested stories (especially Stephen Garner), thank you. We truly enjoyed working on the TP Wire Service project and hope that you found it useful. Today, in honor of Groundhog Day (keeping us mindful of change and fresh starts) is the last day of postings.

Noon

Sixty-six years and 74 days, and I have never been so proud to be an American.
Anything is possible.
Still.
Godspeed, Mr. Obama.
Now the work begins.

Condolences

My heart goes out to our brothers and sisters in Mumbai. Personally, I feel like the guy who had a flat tire on the way to the airport and missed flight XXX, which was subsequently hijacked; I was due to have landed in Mumbai next Wednesday and proceeded to the Oberoi hotel, radioactive American passport in hand, prior to a Thursday seminar. It's a messy world; this was my third near-miss this year. Earlier in Johannesburg a trio of gunman hit my hotel at 6:30 a.m., 20 minutes after I'd left for my seminar that day. And in Mexico City last month, a small jet crashed and burned 5 or 10 blocks from my hotel; the crash was suspicious (still unresolved), as it carried the young Federal Interior Minister who was having some success against the powerful drug cartels.

I am shaken by the three near-misses, as any sane person would be, but will not curtail my International travels in any way. (Give me a couple of weeks re Mumbai, please.) I am a keen believer in the immense benefits of globalization and a charter member of the flat-earth society, circa 2008. It is my pleasure to be of some tiny service to my friends from Kuwait, Saudi, Dubai (week before last), to Kiev, to my beloved South Africa (may Mr Mandela live to 100+), Ukraine, Romania, etc. And India! Re the latter, I am "one of those"—a true blue India lover!

(As a matter of professional interest, I'd suggest Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century. I had just started it; it's a tough slog, but truly an original work.)

Media Sightings Alert

For our friends in the U.K. and anyone who subscribes to the Financial Times, it seems that Tom had 'lunch with the FT' a while back and the writeup of what transpired will appear in FT Weekend tomorrow, November 22. Previous lunches linked here.

N.B. Tom's Lunch with the FT is now available. (Thanks, Bruce, for the heads up.)

2008 Marti Awards

One of our favorite Cool Friends, Marti Barletta, is hosting a survey on her website, TrendSight (the survey's in the right column of the front page), asking for consumers and marketers to vote for their favorite Marketing to Women advertising. The survey will close on December 1 and we'll hear who won before the end of the year. This is the second year of Marti's Marketing to Women awards. Last year's overall winner was Dove's Real Beauty campaign. You can read more about past winners here. Feel free to tell us who you voted for and why in our comments area. If you'd like to read more about Marti, check out her two Cool Friend interviews: One. Two.

Caught In the Act!

I have worked relentlessly to keep this Blog apolitical. For at least two reasons: (1) We are about enterprise management. (With a few VT farm pictures thrown in from time to time.) (2) When a Blog "turns political," then intemperate remarks become the norm—I have spent the better part of the last two months beating up people of every stripe over intemperate language used concerning our presidential candidates.

I think I've had some success in staying apolitical. Nonetheless, the New York Times blew my cover with a lengthy 28 October article in the Technology section that pitted me vs. my great friend Carly Fiorina concerning the election. She is a senior McCain campaign advisor. I was nabbed by YouTube giving the keynote at an Obama rally in Southern Vermont.

I am an Obama supporter, and, having been caught in the act relative to this Blog, I will tell you very succinctly why:

1. I think the time has come to pass the torch to the next generation, and I believe Mr Obama would be an excellent symbol of a new generation of leader. (I think Mr McCain has the haggard look of yesterday, and is, like myself, advertised to be a cranky old man. Age matters—take it from me, and feel free to wish me "happy 66th" on 7 November.)


2. In the spirit of the above, I think Mr Obama would represent a new page overseas for America. Our image is ragged, and I think Mr Obama could and would go a long way toward "bringing America back" to the status of "beacon for the world." (I fear Mr McCain might, on this dimension, project as a continuation of the Bush years.)


3. Concerning foreign affairs, I believe Mr Obama has the disposition and intellect to deal, as best anyone can, with the difficult security challenges we confront; among other things our major problems are likely to be with us for decades—and cannot primarily be dealt with by aircraft carrier superiority, a tough thing for a true blue Navy man to admit. I believe Mr Obama meets the Churchillian standard of "jaw jaw beats war war." I am fearful of Mr McCain's bellicosity and perhaps some volatility. (Unlike the case of Mr Clinton, I also have no doubt that Mr Obama would quickly gain the respect of the U.S. military—as a hot-war veteran, I have no concerns at all on that dimension.)


4. Colin Powell was persuasive.


5. As to experience, I am not troubled by Mr Obama's resume. Surviving Chicago politics, among other things, is no cakewalk—and, also, Mr Obama would be older than either Mr Kennedy or Mr Clinton was upon taking the oath of office. His remarkable cool and measured approach throughout this torrid and lengthy and, at times, bitter campaign suggest to me that he in his own fashion meets the "maturity" test as well or better than any President of any age that I have experienced, with perhaps the exception of Mr Reagan.


6. I sadly believe that Ms Palin is not ready to be Commander-in-Chief on many dimensions. Alas, I have little respect for her, and my McCain diehard friends feel as strongly as I do—almost without fail. I think the selection of Ms Palin does not reflect well on Mr McCain or his "country first" rhetoric. She is a "strong negative" in my assessment of the McCain candidacy. (Understatement.)


7. The economy is as abiding an issue as national security, and I believe Mr Obama would be able to do as well as anyone could in dealing with it. I am very impressed with his principal advisors, including Mssrs Volker, Rubin, Summers, and Buffett—none could be called an ideologue in any way, shape, or form.


8. Though I am an avowed supporter of undiluted capitalism (my faith, like Mr Greenspan's, is being sorely tested), I believe that the growing inequity in America is a clear and present danger of the first order. As Mr Buffett said, and I paraphrase, "There's a problem when my secretary has a higher marginal tax rate than I do." It is time for a focus on the middle class and those not quite there, and I believe Mr Obama has an abiding edge in that regard. (I buy his tax policy, though it will not help my net worth—as stated, and simply put, those with incomes less than $250,000 will see their taxes reduced; this encompasses, also, the vast majority of small business and I am a rabid small business advocate.) As to the "redistributionist" talk, if we wanted to erase re-distribution, we'd have to begin by wiping out Medicaid and Medicare and the progressive income tax of 90 years standing and cut the education budget, among others, to approximately zero. In short, I trust Mr Obama with the economy more than Mr McCain. As to the "threat" of a significant Democratic majority across the board, there may be problems, but I have a hard time imagining Congress pushing Mr Obama around. (NB: Though I probably would have come down on the Obama side in any event, I would have given McCain far more consideration, especially concerning economic affairs, and, of course, succession, if Mr Romney had been his running mate.)


9. I neither want a conservative Supreme Court nor a liberal Court. The swing to the conservative end of the scale would likely exceed my comfort level if Mr McCain had two or three vacancies to fill.

In 1960, I was 18—but the voting age was 21. Mr Eisenhower was an effective President, a great occupant of the office for 1952-1960. But Mr Kennedy represented a sprightly America embracing its next chapter with matchless vigor and optimism. In a way, in 2008 I have the chance to finally cast my "Kennedy vote"—and I have decided to do so by checking the Obama box on my ballot. (Actually, I already have.)

It is not my goal here to convince a single soul concerning next Tuesday's election. It has been my goal here to be "transparent" at tompeters.com concerning a topic that has captivated all of our attention. (This Blog is one of my true loves—and I will go to great lengths to protect what it stands for.)

Thank you for your attention if you have read this far.

(I am prepared for a deluge of huffy Comments, which is fair enough. I would prefer no positive Comments—I am not trying to persuade or seeking mates, as I said; I am simply stating my view to our community.)

Tom Peters posted this on 11/01 | Permalink | Comments (109)

Seasonal Banner Archives

When we posted our new fall banner, Glenn Myers commented that we should create an archive page of our banners. We thought it was a marvelous suggestion. You can find the new page by clicking on Banner Archives in the left column under Resources, or by clicking here.

That Time of the Year, Again

Today is the first day of fall, 2008, though as you all know, the equinox, to quote Wikipedia, "is the moment in time (not a whole day) when the center of the Sun can be observed to be directly above the Earth's equator, occurring around March 20 and September 22 each year." That moment occurred at 10:44 a.m. Eastern time in the United States today. And we were going to post the new banner at that moment, but somehow technology thwarted us. It's there now.

I even tried the old "balance the egg on end" trick, but that didn't work either. It's been a tough morning here at tp.com. We can only hope that things will improve.

We hope you enjoy the new banner and all of us here at tompeters.com want to take this opportunity to wish all of you a bounteous fall season (at least those of you in the northern hemisphere).

Opportunity

There is an opportunity for all of you who would like to view a Tom appearance. This is the last month to register to see him at this year's Global Institute for Leadership Development (GILD) presented by Linkage on October 12-17 in Palm Desert, California. Register now.

If you can't make it there in person, you get another chance! Tom's speech is to be broadcast over the Internet—not for free—but still a great chance to experience a speech by Tom. Sign up to view Tom's presentation virtually, broadcast live on October 16th.

DailyLit Publishes Tom's 50List Books and The Pursuit of Wow!

As we (sort of) promised back on May 12 of this year when we announced the launch of Tom's Success Tips at DailyLit.com, The Brand You50, The Professional Service Firm50, The Project50, and The Pursuit of Wow! are now available via the digital publisher. While these are not free, the price of $4.95 for 50+ (Tom always delivers more than he promises) essential tips on how to succeed at work seems quite reasonable. (Especially for our British friends!) And the folks at DailyLit have even managed to preserve some of the design elements from those books. You won't see those graphics on your BlackBerry, but we think you'll be pleasantly surprised by what you see in your email version of each installment. Happy digital reading!

Happy Birthday to Us

We started the blog before Tom joined in, so there are entries prior to four years ago today, but today is the day we consider our birthday. The official start of Tom's blogging is 28 July 2004, and today marks four years of blog posts! We'd like to thank all our readers for staying with us and contributing to the success of this blog.

RSS Feed for Comments

Some of our readers are very active in adding comments to our blog posts. For those of you who use RSS to read this blog, you may enjoy our new feature to keep track of the conversation: an RSS feed for the comments. We've added a new button to the top right of the banner to access the RSS feed. You can see its location above and more detail below.

Thanks to Michael for commenting on this post with the suggestion.

Tom's Tweets

There's a new way to experience Tom's Success Tips. We recently told you about the serialization services of DailyLit and that you can have a success tip delivered to your email inbox each day. Now they've expanded the format of their offerings to Twitter, the micro-blogging service. Tom's not planning to jump on the micro-blogging bandwagon anytime soon (limit Tom to 140 characters? I don't think so), so for now, this is the only way to get your Tom fix on Twitter. How does it work? Using your own Twitter account, you "follow" Tom's Success Tips. Each day, everyone in the world following Tom's Success Tips on Twitter will receive a "tweet" with a link to the same tip. Why sign up for this instead of the DailyLit email delivery? The email delivery is a personal subscription and will begin with the first tip the day you sign up. The Twitter offering is more like a global reading group with everyone receiving the same tip on the same day. Since Twitter can be used on a computer or a cell phone, it's fun to imagine the varied locations and circumstances of the folks who will be reading the tips at the same time. Get on board by June 16th to get the first tip along with the rest of the world's Twittering Tom fans.

Comments Redux

We consider our readership our community. And we appreciate the participation of a great number of community members in the comments area of the blog. There have been some marvelous debates on complex issues. We understand all too clearly how annoying it can be when you try to add your voice by posting a comment and, once you click Post, it seems as though the computer didn't register your action. So you click on it again, and again, and finally you see that your comment has been posted three times. We've been trying to solve this issue for some time now, but with no success. So, apologies for the long wait after you click Post to submit your comment. But please know that even if it takes a long moment, your comment has been submitted. This frustrates no one more than it frustrates Tom. Thank you for your patience!

Daily Quote Launches

Today we began a new offering from Tom—a daily email with a bit of his wisdom in your inbox. By opt-in only, of course. Today's first Tom Peters Daily Quote went to 57 recipients, but we invite you all to sign up. In the top right of this page there is an icon, which, when clicked, takes you to a page where you can subscribe to our TP Times newsletter, and now, the Daily Quote as well. Thank you to the 57 who found it and signed up without knowing when the quotes would start! We hope you and all new subscribers enjoy it.

Not So Recent Photos

Kate at 800-CEO-READ found some photos of Tom from the Pursuit of Wow book tour in 1994 and posted them today. If you've been doing some spring cleaning and have found your own collection of Tom photos, feel free to share them with us.

Tom Peters Live in London!

Opportunities to experience the fizz of a Tom Peters live presentation in London are quite rare these days. That's why we wanted to give visitors at tompeters.com a final heads-up for what is the only London public event in Tom's 2008 speaking schedule. It will take place at the QEII Conference Centre on Monday, 28th April, and Tom is sharing the "Look Beyond Change" theme of the day with Kjell Nordström. You might know Nordström from his Cool Friends spot with Jonas Riddersträle; together they wrote Funky Business and Karaoke Capitalism.

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!

Love It or Leave It

The speaking business, that is. That's Tom's advice for new authors who are considering speaking as a career. (Never the half-way sort, that's Tom's career advice for anyone. Period.) Tom spoke with Jon Mueller at 800-CEO-READ's Author Blog today about his chosen profession. They covered a lot of ground concerning the ins and outs of being a professional speaker. If you're curious about how Tom got his start, or how to communicate effectively with an audience (including one that speaks another language), you should listen to this half hour interview.

A Blog for Business Authors

We have news to share about what our esteemed colleagues at 800-CEO-READ have been up to lately. We mention 8CR now and then as they're a little known, but phenomenal, resource for business authors and the people who love them. One of the areas where they excel is keeping us informed about what thought leaders are saying. Their Daily Blog, New Releases Blog, and the inimitable ChangeThis manifesto site are all must-reads. Now they're reaching out a helping hand with the addition of the Author Blog. Chief blogger Jon Mueller is lighting the path for business authors, exploring and explaining the pitfalls and best practices in the industry. We're excited about this new blog as navigating the business book publishing industry is no easy task and we want to see more great ideas entering the public forum.

Tom Peters Company Wows! You With Two Events

There are two upcoming events presented by the associates at Tom Peters Company, in the UK and in the U.S. You've got to know them through their posts on tompeters.com, now you can hear them virtually and in person.

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.

Wiki Contributions

Have you checked out the PSF wiki lately? Feeling shy? No need! People are joining in and sharing their stories and thoughts about PSF strategy. Here are a few examples you'll find there:

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!

Success Tips at ChangeThis

The Success Tips, also known as 100 Ways to Help You Succeed/Make Money, are complete. Well, sort of. Tom has gone past 100—the last one is #110—and we hope he continues to add to their number. But, there are 100 Success Tips, which was the original plan. Part 2, tips 51 through 100 (plus a bonus #101), is published this month by our friends at ChangeThis. You can get Part 2 here, and while you're at it, you might want to download Part 1 also. Or, go to ChangeThis.com to see what else is new there.

What's Fresh?

Conversation! Join in over your morning coffee or your nightcap this weekend at the PSF wiki. We've added a new badge to the front page (over there underneath the TP Wire Service box in the right column). Simply click on the box and read what people think about real world applications of Tom's PSF50 list. Don't forget to add your own.

Book Page

Sure, you're a Tom-fan. But have you read ALL the books he's written? Did you miss one? Or perhaps you'd like to find your favorite Peters classic read aloud by the man himself (chances are good since he's recorded almost all of them). Find it all on the newest page at the site, Tom's Books.

Update: PSF Wiki

Folks are beginning to start discussions at the PSF wiki. Our team has been changing the format today, hoping that it will make contributing even easier for you. If you're having any troubles, or have suggestions, please let us know. Most of all, we'd love to hear your stories at the wiki. Are you a "Connoisseur of Talent?" Are you "Committing Cool?" Tell us about it!

PSF Wiki

In the comments of a recent post about PSF, one of our frequent commenters, RTodd, asked us the following: "Where can we share stories of the little guy implementing these concepts? Why doesn't Tom Peters.com create a PSF Wiki where people can share, build, and expand on these 50 items."

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.

Watch Tom!

Tomorrow, Friday, December 7, 2007, Tom will be speaking live to Neil Cavuto on Fox Business Network at 6:00 p.m. (Eastern U.S. time). The show is eponymously named Cavuto. Here's an opportunity for our readers who don't often get a chance to see Tom. So, if you have Fox Business Network among your cable TV choices, be sure to tune in!

Podcast by Tom

Karen Salmansohn does a weekly podcast at Lime.com/radio. She calls it "Be Happy, Dammit," and Tom's message fits right into her theme. So, you can listen to 11 minutes of Tom's "Extreme Success Advice" by going to Lime.com and choosing his 25 October 2007 Be Happy, Dammit Podcast. Thank you, Karen!

15 October 1982

Tom called me from the road to tell me this story. He's celebrating an anniversary. On the 15th of October, 1982, he received a small package from New York at his Palo Alto office. When he returned from a meeting in mid-afternoon and opened the package—there it was—two copies of his first book, from an initial print run of 5,000. Beside himself with delight, Tom fondled the book—and headed off to Cupertino with the second copy to give it to a senior executive at Apple, a little computer company with about 200 employees.

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.

Tom's Essential in Taiwan

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.

Anita Roddick

For the next couple of months, or some undetermined period, we will have, as you can see at the top of the right column on this screen-page, a small memorial to Anita Roddick. She challenged all of us to consider our business, of 1 or 1,0001 employees, a force for positive, broad-based social change, while also contributing to traditional capitalist growth through investable profits and job creation. The right thing is also the profitable thing—a message and method to which I, as well, have devoted my career.

(The memorial also links to this excellent article in the Telegraph, which reports on an interview recorded shortly before she died.)

With the Greatest Sadness ...

I have just read on the Web of Anita Roddick's death. While I was hardly her great friend, we were pals and spent many hours over the years chewing the fat about most every topic under the sun. She was passionate about so many worthy causes, and used her business and strength-of-conviction for the greater good in a way that can genuinely be called "peerless" in the exact meaning of that word. In my sphere of business, she was a practitioner and vociferous champion of doing business in a way that contributed enormously and directly to society; her causes went from environmentalism to the creation of a "supply chain" that lifted hundreds of thousands out of poverty.

My best personal memories are of her appetite for life—and her constant challenge to me, in a pointed, no nonsense way, to use my bully pulpit to champion the causes which she and we held dear. She was a "for profit capitalist" who used her commercial power to enhance the life of so many, and, indeed, the planet itself.

At just 64, she departed, alas, much too soon.

Goodbye, Coach

Sadly, one of Tom's inspirations died yesterday. Bill Walsh was the legendary coach who led the San Francisco 49ers to Super Bowl wins for the 1981, 1984, and 1988 seasons. He also coached at Stanford, and part of his tenure coincided with Tom's studies. Read this blog by Rich Karlgaard, who knew both Bill Walsh and Tom during those days. We add our goodbye to his.

There's Still Time to Sign Up

Are you located near Denver? The scheduled Brand You workshop is to be held there on August 1st, so the time to sign up is now. As we said in an announcement a couple of weeks ago, the war for talent is more competitive than ever. Thus, personal branding is becoming increasingly essential. Explore the possibilities of enhancing Brand You to the advantage of yourself and your employer in a customized, one-day session to be presented by Tom Peters Company in partnership with Arapahoe Community College.

Repeat: Brand You workshop, Denver, CO,
August 1. For more information click here, or for registration, click here. There are only a few openings left, so hurry! And for those of you who can't make it to Denver, there'll be another session in Dallas in early October.

Widgets

As you can see, we've added a few new features to our posts. We're catching the Web 2.0 wave and trying to make it easier for you to share what you read here with your friends and colleagues. Below each post, you'll still see the name of the author, the date it's posted, the permalink (the permanent web location for each post), a link to comment (join the conversation!), and the category. You'll now also see a row of icons.

The envelope allows you to email the post to a friend. The colored blocks next to the envelope link to del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site. If you click on the blocks, you can save the post as a bookmark that you can share with your network. The green SU is the icon for StumbleUpon, a great way to discover new sites. You can save the post to your StumbleUpon account and share it with others by clicking on this icon. Next to the StumbleUpon icon is a little guy with a shovel. This is the icon that lets you to submit the post to Digg. Digg is a social bookmarking site that's well known for its post promotion feature that rates the most popular posts. Next to Digg's icon is the alien from reddit. Reddit is similar to Digg in its features, with a focus on rating posts. The last icon links to Technorati. If you click on this link, you can see which blogs are linking to this post. Soon we'll be adding a feature that will indicate how many blogs are linking to each post. We're also planning to add trackbacks.

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

Thanks!

A friend is heading home on leave from Iraq today. I thought I'd write him a note—then I decided to publish it here:

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

Brand You Road Trip

Tom has been saying "Be distinct ... or extinct" for ten years now, and he wrote the seminal book about personal brand distinction, The Brand You50. In an era where the war for talent is more competitive than ever, personal branding is becoming increasingly essential. From establishing your own personal strengths to aligning your values to those of your organization, becoming a Brand You is key.

To address this need, the tompeters!company is bringing a series of Brand You workshops to the public. Following a successful Boston session, the next destination is Denver, CO, on August 1. Partnering with Arapahoe Community College, the tompeters!company will provide a customized, one-day session, in which people from diverse organizations will explore the power of their brands, how to augment them, and how to put them to use.

For more information on the Denver event, click here, or for registration, click here. For those of you who can't make it to Denver, we'll be doing a workshop in Dallas in early October. For information on this Dallas event, other possible stops on the Brand You Road Trip, or the Brand You program in general, e-mail me at nickadams@tompeters.com.

Twins!

For those of you familiar with our community here at tompeters.com, we have a bit of exciting news. Cathy Mosca became a grandmother on Monday. She welcomed not just one, but two babies into her family. We couldn't be happier for her or the twins (they hit the jackpot in the grandmother lotto!). Congratulations from all of us to the whole family!

Leaders Take Breaks

Item #45 in The Leadership50 from Re-imagine! states: Leaders take breaks. And Tom is taking his own advice. He's off walking in a foreign country. Not New Zealand; he's already been there. We don't know where. Maybe he'll return with pictures and stories; maybe not. So at least until the end of April, there won't be any posts from Tom as he's left his computer behind. In the meantime, folks from the Tom Peters Company will be blogging occasionally. Yes, we know it's not the same as Tom, but Tom's off recharging his batteries, because he's got a lot of traveling to do in May.

See Tom Live in Connecticut

The Quinnipiac University School of Business in Hamden, Connecticut, is presenting a Business Leadership Forum, and Tom will be appearing along with several other speakers. It is sponsored in part by a friend of Tom Peters Company, the Miller [Insurance] Agency. Space is limited, so act soon if you'd like to attend. To register, go to www.quinnipiac.edu or call 203-582-3766 by
March 9.

TP Wire Service Staff Update

The TP Wire Service editor and TomWorld denizen, Shelley Dolley, is taking a hiatus. She and her family are expecting a new addition. Shelley will return from maternity leave in a few months. In the meantime, we will continue to bring you the latest news and keep you plugged into the stories we think will interest you most via the TP Wire Service.

Excellence 2007

You'll notice a new banner at tompeters.com today. 2007 is the 25th anniversary of the publication of In Search of Excellence. Thus the Excellence25 logo on the right side of the banner with the years 1982-2007 running along the bottom. Our focus is not so much a celebration of the book, as much as a celebration of the idea of Excellence, which, as Tom said in his post of 29 December, is as potent today as it was when he first presented it. To that end, this is the first of what we hope are a dozen or more banners from our friend, designer Ken Silvia (he's the man behind the red exclamation point), exploring Excellence. We feel that the banner images convey the timelessness and power of Excellence. We hope you think so, too.