Dispatches from the New World of Work

Could It Be This "Simple" #2?

Another of our very best business analysts, James B. Stewart, offered this "simple" commentary in the 3 June Wall Street Journal:

"It has been long in coming, this slow death of what was once the greatest and biggest corporation in the world. The myriad causes of its demise have been thoroughly chronicled, but to my mind one stands out: The custodians of GM simply gave up trying to build the best cars in the world. To accommodate a host of competing interests, from shareholders to bondholders to labor, they repeatedly compromised on excellence. [My italics.] Once sacrificed, that reputation has proved impossible to recapture. ... Can anyone say GM builds the best cars in any category?"

Memory Lane:
Long Time Comin'

During the heydays of In Search of Excellence, a Stanford economics professor under whom I'd studied invited me to a business economists' seminar—my one and only visit to a forum of professional economists.

I have only one memory. Namely, a GM staff economist, red-faced (literally), accosting my prof to castigate him for inviting me. During the prior couple of years, or prior 5 or 6 years (?), GM's market share had dropped from 45% to 36%. I had said that GM had "lost 20% of its market share in the last X years"—obviously accurate. (That is: 9/45 = .20.) This guy went on and on (and on!) about having "only" lost 9%. He was right in absolute terms—obviously. (Yes, 45 – 36 = 9.) And I was obviously right in relative terms.

The memory this morning is of this little-trivial "moment of denial" (dear god, 9% is awful) which, alas, has been characteristic of the last 30 years of GM's history. The depth of the GM malaise, of course, is why we the taxpayers are highly unlikely to get much or any of our $50 billion plus back that we are about to "invest."

(I know why we're doing what we're doing and concede it's probably necessary; but, at age 66, having just flown around the world in one week and eight hours, it is annoying to realize that a few minutes of those grueling hours will have been devoted to generating tax dollars going to GM to extend their public agony; I'd rather have said tax $$, which I don't begrudge Uncle Sam, going to, say, university biotech research—i.e., tomorrow rather than yesterday.)

I chose this morning to think about Cisco and Apple and Oracle and Google and Walmart and Whole Foods and Starbucks and Amgen and Medtronic and Basement Systems and all the other great American companies that now define us. And the unknown wee companies, founded yesterday or the day before, that will knock off the Starbucks and Ciscos—long live creative destruction, the true engine of longterm prosperity.

Guarantee!

Guarantee?
How ridiculous!
But here it comes.

I guarantee that any reader from anywhere can learn something from this book:

Retail Superstars: Inside the 25 Best Independent Stores in America, by retail guru
George Whalin

Guarantee?
Yup!

These are stores that, literally, give new meaning to the word "special." That personify one of my "Top 10 Favorite Quotes," from Jerry Garcia (The Grateful Dead): "You don't want to be merely the best. You want to be the only ones who do what you do."

We start, naturally, in Fairfield, Ohio, home to Jungle Jim's International Market. The adventure in "shoppertainment" begins in the parking lot, and goes on to 1,600 cheeses and, yes, 1,400 varieties of hot sauce—not to mention 12,000 wines priced from the very bottom to $8,000 a bottle; all this is brought to you from 4,000 vendors from around the world. Like virtually all the stores in this book, customers arrive from every corner of the globe.

There's Abt Electronics in Chicago, Zabar's in Manhattan, and Bronner's Christmas Wonderland in Frakenmuth, Michigan—a town of just 5,000 whose 98,000-square-foot "shop" features the likes of 6,000 Christmas ornaments, 50,000 trims, and anything else you can name if it pertains to Christmas.

There's the Ron Jon Surf Shop in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
And Junkman's Daughter in Atlanta, and Smoky Mountain Knife Works in Sevierville, Tennessee.

We finish the tour where we started—in Ohio. This time we visit Hartville Hardware in Hartville, OH.

These stores demonstrate-prove so many things:

You can create a worldwide attraction and thrive as an independent in the Age of the Big Box retailer.
You can do anything.
You can be from anywhere.
You can make any-damn-thing bizarrely-amazingly-stupendously special.
"Customer care" gets a new definition.
"Showmanship" gets a new definition.

If you run a training department ... you can learn from this book.
If you run a sales department of 1 or 101 people ... you can learn from this book.
If you run a purchasing department ... DEDICATED TO INTERNAL CUSTOMER CARE ... you can learn from this book.

You can learn about Special.
You can learn about being "the only ones who do what we do."
You can learn about Leadership.
You can learn about "experience marketing."
You can learn about the irrelevance of Supersized Competitors ... if you are special enough.
You can learn about Sustaining EXCELLENCE.

Inside the 25 Best Independent Stores in America gives new meaning to my trademark phrase:

EXCELLENCE. Always.
If not EXCELLENCE, What?

As I said, perhaps for the first time:

I guarantee that any reader engaged in any activity, who wants to, can learn from this book.

[Note from Cathy: Tom says the fun starts in the parking lot, but I say it starts on the websites of these businesses. Except for the Junkman's Daughter link, every one of the links in this post leads to an exciting website with fantastic images and goods aplenty on offer. And if you want a sword, I know where you can get one. In fact, I almost bought a knife, a basket of goodies, a set of speakers ... ]

Excellence.
Always.
All You Need to Know.
(More or Less.)

My recent Shanghai seminar went from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (or so), three days running. In fact, as best I can recall, this was the first time I've ever done three straight days, all day, by myself!

(Yes, I slept on the flight home from Shanghai to Boston; at least, I think I did—I don't remember.)

As the last half of day three began, I wanted to summarize—very succinctly—what had gone before. I pulled together 25 slides (attached), making just six points:

Point #1/Aspiration.

I recalled a seminar in Siberia in April 2006. Given the unusual setting, I dug deep into my often neglected packet of Basic Beliefs about Organizations. So I issued a challenge, and have issued it a hundred times since.

At its best (alas, hardly the norm), an organization, any organization can be/should be:

... an emotional, vital, innovative, joyful, creative, entrepreneurial endeavor that elicits maximum concerted human potential in the wholehearted service of others—e.g., Employees, Customers, Suppliers, Communities, Owners, Temporary partners.

My question, as I said, repeated now a hundred times: What else—literally—could the point be of any collective human endeavor, grand or mundane? No, I can't imagine this as the norm on any given day, but I can imagine this as a very real, very pragmatic aspiration. I've discovered that, upon serious reflection, most people agree that this is indeed a pragmatic aspiration—an aspiration worthy of measuring oneself and one's mates against.

This is the point of organization.
This is the point of organizing per se.
Period.

(Right?)

Point #2/Listen.

I have become obsessed with "listening." (About time, some of my friends might add ...) I think it was Dr. Jerome Groopman's book, How Doctors Think, that tipped the balance. Groopman observes that the patient is unequivocally the best source of information about the patient's perceived problem. But to extract useful info the doc must listen to lots of noise along with some signal. Alas, research that the average doc interrupts the patient after 18 seconds! I'd say the average [know-it-all?] boss is in the same sorry boat.

Everything (!!—big word) proceeds from listening—to our spouse, our kids, our friends, strangers along the way (my forte), our students, our employees, our customers, etc. And yet, while we study accounting or history or piano for years and years, we seldom if ever study listening.

Study.
Really study.
Pursue Mastery.
Pursue Excellence.
Become a "professional."

When "six-sigma" quality became the rage, one of the accoutrements was a rash of training programs that allowed one to become a "six-sigma blackbelt." Companies of all sorts and sizes made a big fuss over this. Though it's a little much for me, I nonetheless want to steal shamelessly: I want organizations of every size and shape to start programs aimed at having participants work assiduously to achieve and then maintain "listening blackbelt" status.

Listening, to one and all, intently and constantly, even obsessively, may be/is the greatest of strategic strengths—the greatest of "sustainable competitive advantages."

100% "Listening Blackbelts"!
Or bust!

Point #3/Ask.

Dave Wheeler commented at tompeters.com that the "four most important words" in an organization are:

"What do you think?"

I agree.
Wholeheartedly and unabashedly.

Shouldn't "listening" and "asking" be combined? Perhaps, by some narrow logic. But remember my situation—trying to extract for my Chinese colleagues the most significant points in a 3-day seminar. It's my subjective judgment that The Big Four Words—"What do you think?"—must be singled out, put on their own separate and tall pedestal.

There is no greater honor (!!) that can be bestowed upon a person, peasant or prince, than "What do you think?" "What do you think?" automatically makes me a person of value, whose observations and opinions are of the greatest importance to the functioning of the organization.

Benefits are piled upon benefits! The person routinely asked "What do you think?" starts thinking about what to say when asked "What do you think?"!! This Virtuous Circle of Engagement literally ensures that the quality (breadth and depth) of engagement increases markedly over time.

The idea here—obviously, I assume—stretches beyond the borders of our formal organization. E.g.: "What do you think?" is also World's Best Customer Loyalty Program! The Web is, in fact, teaching us the limitless value of The 3Cs—Continuous Customer Conversations.

Get "Ask" & "Listen" right and you've taken a giant step toward Excellence—the Holy Grail!

Point #4/Fail.

Ask.
Listen.

Act.

"It" is all about attention-recognition-engagement. And action. None of the above, to state the obvious, matters unless something happens. Twenty-seven years ago Bob Waterman and I put "bias for action" at the top of our list of the Eight Basics of Excellence. As the speed of change accelerates exponentially, that notion increases in importance—also exponentially. I've often said that I've learned but one thing in my 40-year professional career: "He/She who tries the most stuff wins."

Well, I mean it.

But it is the corollary to "bias for action" that I singled out to my Shanghai colleagues, the more difficult-to-swallow Fast Failure Imperative that necessarily accompanies rapid learning, adaptation, and improvement. "Fail. Forward. Fast."—that was the advice from a high-tech CEO who attended a seminar of mine years ago. David Kelley, IDEO design: "Fail faster, succeed sooner." And the word/s according to Nobel Laureate (Literature) Samuel Beckett: "Fail. Fail again. Fail better."

My point to my colleagues: "IT IS NOT NEARLY ENOUGH TO 'TOLERATE' FAILURE—ONE MUST CELEBRATE FAILURE."

To move fast, adjust fast, take advantage of the constant dialogue-conversation discussed above ("ask"-"listen"), one must be "trying new stuff"—all the time and at a ferocious pace. Tryin' new stuff means screwing up constantly—then adjusting fast with a new try ("Fail. Fail again. Fail better."). At the heart of the matter—yes, the heart—is the wholesale celebration (CEL-E-BRA-TION!!) of failure. As NYC Mayor/entrepreneur Mike Bloomberg aptly put it: "In business, you reward people for taking risks. When it doesn't work out you promote them—because they were willing to try new things. If people ... tell me they skied all day and never fell down, I tell them to try a different mountain."

Ask.
Listen.
Fail.

And: Succeed.

Point #5/Life Success.

Dave Liniger founded the real estate colossus RE/MAX. He says that putting the customer (home purchaser) first is not the way he looks at things. To have sustaining success with customers his field team must be learning, growing—succeeding. Making that field team a passel of superstars on the march is the principal point of the exercise. Hence he delightfully states of RE/MAX:

"We are a life success company."

Remember my initial challenge to make the organization: ... an emotional, vital, innovative, joyful, creative, entrepreneurial endeavor that elicits maximum concerted human potential in the wholehearted service of others—e.g., Employees, Customers, Suppliers, Communities, Owners, Temporary partners.

That comes, in the end, from a team hellbent for vigor-enthusiasm-growth-learning-service-life success. I'll go further and insist that over the long haul, Service Excellence (and every organization exists only to serve!) cannot be sustained unless those who are called upon to provide it day in and day out are fully engaged in a Quest for Excellence—my words for "life success." (I think, from my contact with him, that Dave L. would gladly sign off on that.)

I'll end this section by repeating an earlier message: Creating "life successes," like listening and asking, goes way beyond our borders. Our goal is an encompassing team striving for collective Excellence—staff, customers, vendors, etc. A great company aims not just to "satisfy" its customers—but to contribute to their individual and collective growth and success—to help its customers achieve Excellence. A great company aims to stretch its vendors in their quest for growth-success-Excellence. Creating "life success" sagas, then, is an inclusive adventure.

Point #6/Excellence.

Anonymous, from tompeters.com:

"Excellence can be obtained if you:

... care more than others think is wise;
... risk more than others think is safe;
... dream more than others think is practical;
... expect more than others think is possible."

Excellence.
Always.
If Not Excellence, What?
If Not Excellence Now, When?

So there you have it, or, rather, there they (my Chinese colleagues) had it/have it. Tom's "Six-step Program, Circa 2009."

Hats Off ONE

The Hotel Pulitzer here in Amsterdam has a fabulous location (in the exact middle of things), etc., etc. But on my Short List of Lustworthy Attributes it scores a Perfect Ten on three, whereas even the best of the best are often awful on All Three!!

(1) Windows that can be flung Waaaaaaay Open!
(2) A Veeeeeeery Bright bedside lamp.
(3) WiFi that actually is easy to connect to and, so far, has a great signal that isn't interrupted. (I CANNOT TELL YOU—IN 2009—HOW MANY HOTELS HAVE WIFI THAT CAN ONLY BE GRADED "SUCKS STUPENDOUSLY.")

Give me those three, a clean duvet and toilet and shower, and I'm a Happy Camper!

Picture above: Spring comes to Amsterdam, a canal view—what else? Picture below: House boat—I called Susan; I want one!

Recession Blues RX I

Watch this and boost your spirits.

(I admit that I teared up. But, then, like my idol, Winston Churchill, I do that a lot.)

Questionable Assertions:
Let's Take a Second Look

Comments on my post on In Search of Excellence and the limits to management "research" were heartwarming—thanks! One, however, was so off base that I felt it necessary to reply. Some of the misconceptions, I fear, are widespread:

Comment: "Suppose we had done both—apply Japanese style management (invented by an American by the way) and also still had our IBM's, HP, J&J's etc. I think In Search of is partly responsible for the downfall of manufacturing because it became uncool."

TP/me: (1) Wrong book; In Search was almost all manufacturers—it was Liberation Management, in 1992, that focused on services—and I wouldn't change a word, or at least not many. (2) Manufacturing is hardly dead in the U.S.; that is hogwash; it's microchips and software and biotech and medical devices, not so much autos; mfg as a share of GDP has been pretty much steady, or no more than a tick down, for years in the U.S.—it just doesn't take many people to make things anymore (that's called productivity improvement, the #1 engine of economic growth). (3) Every major economy in the world, even Germany, is a "service economy." Period. (4) Remember that the "service" part includes "services added" to manufacturing—consider the likes of GE Aircraft Engines, GE Power Systems, GE Medical Devices—over half the revenues of these outfits comes from "services added," such as life-cycle service packages for customers. (5) Last time I heard, IBM-J&J-HP were all three very alive and very well—e.g., HP just became the first $100-billion computer company in the world! (6) The Japanese economy has been in or near the tank for a decade-and-a-half now; not clear they're a great role model; among other things, Japan doesn't generate many entrepreneurs (which is crippling at a time of tech change), and they've had to "offshore" a ton of manufacturing as their wages soared—a good thing. (7) Fact is, we did indeed re-import many if not all the "Japanese techniques," such as TQM and Continuous Improvement—and our car companies' problem is not manufacturing quality, which is by and large at parity with the Japanese, Koreans, etc.; the problem is mostly high wages and benefits, which ordinarily would be called a good thing (e.g., improving workers' well-being); and by the way, Japanese auto companies' sales are as much in the tank as ours—for God's sake, even Toyota is reorganizing.

Back to you ...

Say It Ain't So, Jim!

The cover story in the Boston Globe "Ideas" section yesterday attacked the value and validity of the most popular business books, as always taking Bob Waterman, Jim Collins, and me to task. I agree with some of the charges leveled, and disagree with others. But there is one substrata of argument that I take near violent exception to. Namely, that Bob and I, at least, were purporting to provide a complete success prescription, based on flawless accumulation of data, which managers should follow like the Ten Commandments—or eight, in our case.

(1) What utter hogwash!
(2) What an insult to our readers!

In Search of Excellence was what it was and wasn't what it wasn't. And it surely never meant to challenge or displace the Holy Bible, Koran, Torah, etc.

Here's the story in brief:

(1) American companies were being roughed up by the Japanese in the late '70s—the first post-War II challenge to American business supremacy.
(2) A couple of Harvard B-school professors, Bill Abernathy and Bob Hayes, put the blame largely on our management practices, as taught at their school, among others. In "Managing Our Way to Economic Decline" in the Harvard Business Review, they argued that we [Americans] were paying too much attention to the numbers, not enough to the "basics" such as product quality—sound familiar?
(3) Bob Waterman and I, resident in another blameworthy institution, McKinsey & Co., agreed 100%. But rather than follow the habit of the moment—urge Americans to adopt, lock, stock, and barrel, Japanese management practices—we imagined that there must be some Western-American businesses that still worked (we subsequently labeled them the "saving remnant").
(4) Bob and I sought out expert advice in the USA and Europe and got a ton of nominations. IBM topped the list, which also included the likes of HP, Johnson & Johnson, Disney, McDonald's, Intel, and Wal*Mart. Incredibly (as viewed from today), almost nobody had examined these firms! Fact was that the likes of the B-schools only examined failures at the time—we were about the first to look at successes. (About which, incidentally, the Globe author is clueless, attacking us for what was—in 1980, and everything must be viewed in context—our primary useful point of difference; namely, surfacing successful examples. We were the business equivalent of Abraham Maslow's approach to psychology; Maslow de facto invented "positive psychology," arguing that we also have to study healthy people—not just sick people, as professional psychologists were wont to do pre-Maslow.)
(5) Bob and I and our colleague David Anderson then went off and interviewed like maniacs for several months—mostly folks "down the line," rather than CEOs—this was another break from the regnant "research" tradition of the B-schools and consultancies. Based on those interviews and our extensive literature research, academic and popular, we reached some tentative conclusions. Key phrase: "tentative conclusions." Dear God in heaven, we never imagined for a moment, a second, or a micro-, nano- or pico-second that we were performing research in the physical sciences from which we would extract definitive solutions along the lines of a theory of planetary movement or the effects of gravitational forces on the bending of light! We looked at a ton of interview data, had a ton of discussions, "tested" our conclusions in literally hundreds of seminars, and concluded, very un-scientifically, that "this looks pretty good"—and that doesn't. This approach was made clear as a bell to anyone who came across our stuff.
(6) About five years after the research started, with America mired in its worst recession since the Great Depression (sound familiar, redux?), we published In Search of Excellence. Unlike Peter Drucker, who avoided storytelling and naming names like the plague, we named names and told stories—and they resonated with a bushel of readers. Incidentally, along the way we dumped about 60%, I'd guess, of the originally nominated companies because we deemed their long-term financial performance to have been inadequate—using some pretty common measures and the prior 20 years' data. There was no rocket science here either—just a "sensible" approach to confirming that we were talking about some pretty good performers. Incidentally, it drives our critics nuts that our surviving companies, indeed experiencing ups and downs (duh!), have apparently continued to perform very well—a 2002 Forbes analysis, performed on the book's 20th birthday, concluded that an "excellence index" based on a basket of "our" companies' stocks had handily outperformed the Dow and S&P 500; given the date, 2002, this encompassed the dotcom boom and bust.

The above is not meant to be a "defense"—to the contrary! I repeat: In Search of Excellence was what it was and wasn't what it wasn't. I'd call it "useful"—and very different from its predecessors in an apparently useful way. Namely, to repeat, (1) about successful rather than unsuccessful companies and (2) loaded with practical stories. I suppose that instead of calling our generic conclusions, around which the book was structured, "eight basics," we could have called them "eight tentative conclusions" or "eight pretty good ideas."

The far more important point is—and this has apparently eluded 100% of our critics: Our readers are not idiots! They are pragmatic businesspeople or managers in the public sector or, pastors or priests or football coaches—the essence of the practice of management in all of these disciplines is indeed pragmatism! That is, our book (and others like it) do not appear in the "religion" section of the book store with the Bible on one side and the Koran on the other. Businesspeople, and police chiefs and fire chiefs and public works directors and elementary school principals, are neither looking for Biblical guidance nor full-blown academic theories of the Einsteinian or Darwinian or Newtonian sort. The are looking for ... "a couple of good ideas" they can use now. They are far more capable than Bob Waterman or I or Gary Hamel or Warren Bennis or Rosabeth Moss Kanter of deciding what's worth trying and what's not in their peculiar context—and when to start trying whatever and when to stop.

And, indeed, for thirty years or so now I, at least, have been trying to provide "a few useful ideas that you can get started on this afternoon."

I am being a bit disingenuous, I admit. There is a "constant undertone" to my thirty years of work. I'd call it that, a "constant undertone," not a Unified Theory of Everything. That is, I stood—and stand—behind the likes of (1) being and staying in touch with reality (MBWA, or Managing By Wandering Around, which Bob W and I found at HP in 1978), (2) putting people first (the likes of Dana Corp and Wal*Mart '78, Southwest Airlines today), (3) innovation through decentralization (3M, J&J then and now), (4) staying close to your customer (IBM then and now—with a few hiccups in between), (5) core values (the likes of McDonald's and W.L. Gore—Bob and I loved Ray Kroc's "QSCV," Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value, at McDonald's) and (6) doing now instead of talking forever (3M and HP were masters in '78).

Oh yeah, and the most important one of all: (7) Excellence per se! Bob and I may have been about the first to suggest that "excellence" ought to be as much an aspiration for businessmen as for would-be Olympians. That was our "ardent belief"—and did not in any way pretend to be "teased from the data." "Excellence" was, is, and shall ever be totally subjective! And the notion, I'm delighted to say, seemed to have resonated then—and resonates now.

I'm willing to stake any modest usefulness of my career on the "usefulness" of these seven ideas, and a few more that are absent courtesy space constraints. And stake any modest usefulness, far more important, on having listened to and then done my best to share some terrific stories told to me by the likes of Bill and Vieve Gore of W.L. Gore, Frank McGuire of FedEx, Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines, or Master Educator Dennis Littky.

There you have it.

But not quite.

I must inject one sour—and sad—note. Jerry Porras and Jim Collins are pals and colleagues of mine. I think Built to Last was a terrific book with a ton of those "pretty good ideas" between the covers. (Though I don't really like the idea of merely "lasting" as an aspiration—but that's just me.) Likewise, I think Jim's Good to Great is terrific—loaded with "pretty good ideas" that are of immediate use. (Though again I have nitpicks.) But Jim and I are on absolutely opposite sides of the fence, indeed the universe, on two things he wrote or apparently said to the Globe guy. I went out of my way repeatedly to say to the Globe reporter: "The 'research' represented by the In Search of Excellence 'product' should never, ever be confused by the research-experimentation performed to confirm Einstein's theory of relativity. That is not nor will it ever be the standard in the so-called 'social sciences.'" In fact I added that I was one of the ones who think it's a travesty to award a Nobel in economics—economics ain't physics either, as you'll discover when you next check the status of your 401(k). Well, Mr Collins apparently disagrees! Not only does he compare his [note the italics] research to physics, but he also claims to have discovered "immutable laws of organized human performance."

Dear God!
Or, rather, God help us.

Alas, with those claims, I'm afraid Jim gives the Globe writer a boost beyond the fellow's wildest dreams! If "we"-the-gurus [I despise that moniker, by the way] think we are in the business of discovering and propagating "immutable laws," then we deserve all the opprobrium of the Globe writer, the rest of our critics, and our readers-customers.

As I said, Dear God!

NB: I have no desire to defend In Search of Excellence—the fact that some people are still pissed off about its success 27 years later is good enough for me! I am writing this almost entirely because of my irritation with Mr. Collins.

Thank You, Trish!

One Bolllinger employee left us the following Comment:

"I'm one of the very lucky 434 employees at Bollinger that were the beneficiaries of Jack's largesse. It was a wonderful gift, but not a huge surprise—Jack Windolf lives his life this way—in appreciation of all that he has and all that his employees contribute to the business. I've worked for him for 16 years and I can tell you, Jack is a class act and so is the company he's built. And I do mean 'built'—he's no flash in the pan CEO hired last year, but someone who's spent 40+ years of his life building something worthwhile and lasting. Bravo, Jack."

A Monument for Jack Windolf!

JW is CEO of Bollinger Insurance. When he sold 51% of the company last year, he received $500,000 in deferred compensation. He recently decided to spend $434,000.

How?

He gave each of his 434 employees a $1,000 check out of his own pocket—which he called a "mini-economic stimulus package."

Source: AOL, 0405.09

Three Plus Cheers for Bonuses!

Wal*Mart has increased its annual bonus to 1,000,000 "rank and file" U.S. workers. That's up almost 50% compared to last year.

Bravo!

Larry Rocks!
Methodist Rocks!
(And They're Not Alone.)

I was ecstatic to see that Larry Ellison had a damn decent quarter at Oracle—enough in the black to initiate the company's first ever dividend payment! The same day I read the upbeat Oracle story, I was taking care of a nasty sinus problem (on a stop between Colombia and Lithuania) with a couple of visits to Houston's awe-inspiring Methodist Hospital System.

Oracle and Methodist got me thinking about how much is working and moving in the U.S. economy, though you sure as hell wouldn't know it from the press and its pundits—or the President's schedule-of-gloom.

We are getting the tar beaten out of us, to be sure, but the "American narrative," circa 2009, does not begin and end on Wall Street and/or Detroit.

The good news keeps pouring out of our research universities and medical centers. The good news is marked by venture-funded startups in every aspect of information technology (from materials research to devices to the Internet and other media) and biotechnology and renewable energy and green enhancements and materials science and medical devices. (And. And. And.) The good news is that the race is still on and excitement is still high in the likes of Houston and Austin and San Antonio and Seattle and Silicon Valley-SF-Berkeley and Boston-Cambridge and Madison and Raleigh-Durham and Champaign-Urbana and Northern Virginia-Bethesda and San Diego and LA. (And. And. And.)

No, my glasses have not acquired a rose-colored tint. But they haven't entirely fogged over either. Give up on the U.S.A. for the next 10 years? Fill your wardrobe with hair shirts? What a joke. The best may or may not be yet to come—but there's a lotta "best" going on around us every minute of every day.

I don't recommend a Grade A sinus infection as an excuse, but c'mon down to Houston Methodist Med Center—and watch America shine at what we shine at. You'll be blown away!

Basics57: From Action to Excellence

For a presentation in Auckland on Friday I created a document centered around 21 "Basics." Upon reaching Queenstown on Saturday, as per my custom, I ended up expanding it to "Basics57." You'll find it below, and in PowerPoint format.

1. Action! "Bias for action." "Ready. Fire. Aim." "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
2. Failure. "Whoever makes the most mistakes wins." "Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes."
3. Execution! "The last 98%." Enjoy-master the politics or flunk out. The invisible "underbelly" is the key!
4. Great things, small packages. Germany's Mittelstand.
5. Not cool coolest of the cool. Basement Systems Inc. Jim's Group, 2,800 franchisees, masters of dog-walking.
6. Big 4. TP's "4 for 40," 4 things I've learned in 40 years. Decentralization. Execution. Accountability. 6:15AM.
7. Clarity around core values. For living, not for shareholders—best way for shareholders to win.
8. Organizations exist to serve. Period.
9. People first. "Life success company." "Put the customer second." "Cathedrals devoted to human growth."
10. "What do you think?" "Dream manager."
11. Quality obsession.
12. No corner-cutting in tough times.
13. Design-produce Brilliant/Memorable Experiences. Everywhere. Accounting Dept. as Cirque du Soleil.
14. Keep climbing the value-added ladder. Best Buy/Geek Squad. IBM Global Services.
15. Department as "PSF"/Professional Service Firm. From "overhead" to "principal engine of value-added."
16. "Insanely great." "Only ones who do what we do." "Radically thrilling." Words matter!
17. Emotions rule. Always.
18. Brand You. Declaration of Independence. "Distinct or extinct."
19. Design. Apple. Apple. Apple.
20. Innovate or die. "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
21. R&D imperative in tough times.
22. You are who you hang out with. "Hang out with weird, get weird. Hang out with dull, get dull."
23. Diversity for diversity's sake.
24. Nudgery/Multiplier power/Little = Big. Pronovost's ICU check list. Etching in the urinal.
25. Location power. The #1 underutilized invisible megalever.
26. "Business model." Microsoft. "This is how we make money in 25 words or less."
27. Obsessive-compulsive relationship development and maintenance. Measure it! Focus on the "underbelly"!
28. Crowdsourcing.
29. BlogPower.
30. Decency. Thoughtfulness. Value is X10 in tough times.
31. Smile. Nelson Mandela. D.D. Eisenhower. Starbucks.
32. Give good tea. Ben Franklin.
33. Dance your way to a world-altering alliance in 96 hours. Edward VII.
34. "Thank you."
35. Apologize. Make the 3-minute call. "Three-minute call hour."
36. Comeback power. Comeback > Perfection.
37. "Kindness is free."
38. Transparency.
39. Accountability.
40. Enthusiasm. Energy. Exuberance.
41. Hiring #1. 2 per year/promotion power. 1st line supervisor power.
42. Pick "people people." Select-for-intangibles.
43. Resilience. "We'll lick 'em tomorrow."
44. Appetite for tough times. Tough times define your life.
45. Calendar management. "Calendars never lie."
46. "Hard is soft. Soft is hard." "0 for 15."
47. Women Are the Market. "Womenomics."
48. Women rule. Women are the best leaders.
49. Boomers-geezers have all the $$$$$.
50. Integrity.
51. Wildly "over-communicate," especially in tough times.
52. XFX/Cross-functional excellence = Lunch management.
53. Listening. Listening-as-strategy. Hearing > Listening. Become a student!
54. Know yourself—far easier said than done.
55. MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around. "In touch" power. Measure it!
56. Show up in tough times.
57. EXCELLENCE. ALWAYS.

Creativity Award in Tough Times

Tough times require a special emphasis on creativity. My top award to date (I'm late on this) goes to Hyundai, for its program of allowing a purchase to be returned within a year if the purchaser becomes unemployed.

Bravo, for the decency, for the marketing value, and for unadulterated creativity!

The 19Es of Excellence

Today's joyous commemoration of the birth of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and tomorrow's unique show of peaceful American renewal and celebration of limitless American possibility got me thinking about Excellence—no surprise. Out of which came these "19 Es of Excellence." You will also find it as a PDF.

If Not Excellence, What?
If Not Excellence Now, When?
The "19 Es" of Excellence:

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! Adhere to the Bill Parcells doctrine: "Blame nobody! Expect nothing! Do something!")
Empowerment. (Respect and appreciation rule! Always ask, "What do you think?" Then listen! Then let go and liberate! Then celebrate!)
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 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 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?)

What a Splash!

"Daddy, the plane turned into a boat" said the daughter of Martin Sosa, who was a passenger on the now infamous US Airways flight 1549 of 16th January. This was the flight that was involved in the amazing emergency landing in the Hudson River that we all heard about in the media last weekend. (Observer, 18 January 2009)

The stories of real heroism from last Friday's miraculous experience are plentiful and heartwarming. Thank goodness for the sheer dedication of the professionals who got involved in the landing and rescue missions that saved the lives of all passengers and crew. In particular, the pilot has been rightly praised for his skill and devotion to duty.

But how about the amazing resilience of the aircraft that survived this most extreme of circumstances? Just how do you design and build an aircraft that can cope with the failure of two engines, followed by the crash landing in the water ... with pretty much every piece intact?!!

For many years, I have enjoyed working with engineers and manufacturing folks from different parts of the aerospace industry. We've had many an intellectual tussle over their propensity to check and re-check, with me encouraging them to "see failure as part of the learning process." But when you see something as astonishing as Friday's emergency landing on water, you can see the payoff for their discipline and consistency. Okay, so future excellence in aerospace will be dependent on some lateral and out-of-the-box thinking, but let's not forget to treasure the mastery and expertise that delivers today's excellence. Bravo ladies and gentlemen of the aerospace industry!

We Don't Do Movie Reviews at This Blog!

All rules are made to be broken. You must see Slumdog Millionaire. That's an order.

[Or buy the book it's based on.—CM]

Whatever Are We "Gurus" Gonna Do?

Management gurudom seems to depend on GE excellence. GE is a monopoly supplier of case examples to Guruworld. With GE Capital wobbly, and with GE Capital's Immelt-era profits accounting for 50% of the whole firm's profits, I'd be surprised if the company ever returns to its Welchian glory. (Which is not to knock Immelt—Welch is the true architect of hyper GE Capital-centrism.)

Scratch GE.
Scratch Starbucks.
Uh, scratch Enron.
And Countrywide and WaMu.

There's always Wal*Mart.
Thank God.
Mr. Sam, we love you.

Commonplace?

Susan just severed a relationship with a professional working on a project with her. The person was creative and personable. But time and again failed to deliver the goods—actually hard goods in this case. Whether accounting or plumbing or design work, I'd wager that 75% of firings of professionals comes from follow-through, not the cleverness of the work. (Give me your guess on the percentage. Please.)

(In this case the professional was indeed personable, a key trait. But on the EQ side, the person in question lost by arguing every point with Susan rather than acknowledging responsibility.)

Gill MA & Success Tip #1

I've argued that as tough times loom (or are here, as they surely are as last week's statistics demonstrated), reviving a focus on the basics almost tops the "to do" list. Aiming mostly at the basics, we've been offering our own To Do list—145 Success Tips to date. Which brings me to Gill MA.

I usually fly to the Great City of Wherever from Logan Airport. The trip from Tinmouth VT to Boston passes through Gill MA. It's exactly halfway—hence the perfect place for a pit stop. With choices aplenty, I am nonetheless firm in my habit of stopping at the Wagon Wheel Restaurant. It's, in fact, a smallish coffee shop-diner. The food, including the fresh muffins that are about a foot away as you enter (typically at dawn's early light, in my case), is boffo. The attitude is boffo, too. But make no mistake, my custom is well and truly earned, a half dozen times a month, by the restroom!

It's clean-to-sparkling. (Come to think of it, despite the invariably crowded shop, I have never seen the tiniest scrap of paper on the bathroom floor.) Fresh flowers are the norm. And best of all, there is a great multi-generational collection of family (the owner's family, as I recall) pictures that cover all the walls; I invariably spend an extra minute examining one or another, smiling at a group photo from a local company dinner, or some such, circa 1930 I'd guess.

Well, the likes of Gill's finest won pride of place on our success tip list. Namely, the #1 spot went to "clean and neat," with an emphasis on restrooms. To me, a clean, and attractive and even imaginative loo is the best "I care" sign in a retail shop or professional office—and it goes double when it comes to employee restrooms!

Recession is upon us, and odds are it'll linger. Step #1: Mind the restrooms! The basics are more important than ever, and I can't think of a better place to start. (Or a better person than the owner or manager to be in charge.)

Corporate-Unit Values: "Required" Addition Thereto

I like, and value, the word "decency"—a lot. (E.g., my rave reviews of Steve Harrison's The Manager's Book of Decencies: How Small Gestures Build Great Companies.) I like the word "respect"—a lot.

But I'm stuck on-hooked on-wedded to-wild about another word these (perilous) days: thoughtfulness. I am enamored with the idea of living and then adding to our formal or informal vision & values statement: "We are thoughtful in all we do." I'm so taken with the idea that I suggest that "thoughtfulness" joins the likes of "people," "customers," "product," "profit," "action," "excellence" on the "10 Great Business Words list"—or some such.

Times are perilous.
Competition is brutal.
Hustle is essential.
Cost-cutting is imperative.

All true!
But how, in the process of getting from here to difficult there in concert with our many constituents-stakeholders with whom we hope to do business over the long haul, do we "live in the world"?
Who are we?
How are we?
What are we as a human institution?
Who am I (boss, follower)?
What do I leave in my wake?

It's character in a way, to be sure. (Another stunningly important word.) But, in a sense, thoughtfulness is even more encompassing than character. It is transactional—applies to literally every internal and external transaction—as well as something that resides deep within.

I like the idea of showing up for work in a place that cherishes thoughtfulness.
I like the idea of doing business with a service provider known for its thoughtfulness.
I like being a vendor to an outfit that's thoughtful.
All this is X10 in troubled times.

Thoughtful is not "soft."
No.
No.
No.

No.
No.
No.

In fact, I'd contend that "dogmatic thoughtfulness" (now there's a term) improves growth and profitability and longterm enterprise solidity in a pretty damn direct, high impact, ultimately measurable cause-and-effect way.

Thoughtfulness is key to customer retention.
Thoughtfulness is key to employee recruitment and satisfaction.
Thoughtfulness is key to brand perception.
Thoughtfulness is key to your ability to look in the mirror—and tell your kids about your job.
"Thoughtfulness is free."
Thoughtfulness is key to speeding things up—it reduces friction.
Thoughtfulness is key to transparency and even cost containment—it abets rather than stifles truth-telling.

So think about thoughtfulness, about adding "thoughtfulness in all we do" to your unit's values statement. But do so only after you and your team have figured out exactly what thoughtfulness means in a variety of contexts. And do so only after you have made a demonstrated personal and organizational commitment to thoughtfulness. Thence, you must be unabashedly devoted to keeping each other honest in the practice of dogmatic thoughtfulness—with, alas, adverse consequences, eventually severe, for those who fail to take this essential attribute aboard.

Starting time?
Not "today"—but "now."
That is, thoughtfulness is an especially potent "tool" in crazy-disruptive-scary times.

Kudos to TPWS

Trolling the Web recently, we found praise for one of our favorite parts of the tompeters.com network, tpwireservice.com (TPWS). You should visit it now if you've never seen it. Every day, the TPWS editor, Shelley Dolley, scours the Web for news related to the subjects dear to Tom: Excellence, Talent, Design, Books, Implementation, Branding, Marketing to Women and Boomers (known as Trend$), etc. And she collects them into one place for easy access by Tom fans, aspiring entrepreneurs, Brand Yous, and the like. And, she does a wonderful job! We're glad to see that others feel the same. Thanks to Steve Matthews at the Vancouver Law Librarian Blog for noticing TPWS and reminding us what great work Shelley does.

Excellence!
Period!

Like it or not, my favorite definition of "quality" or "excellence," like the famous quote about "pornography," has always been, "I'll know it when I see it."

Well, I know it when I see it.

I am not a gaga Bruce Springsteen fan. Or I wasn't at 8:45 p.m. this past Saturday, as a monster thunder storm attacked Gillette Stadium (Foxboro MA) and delayed the start of The Boss's live concert—soggy and bedraggled, those of us on the field were herded (perfect word choice) off to escape our temporary metal floor while the lightning fired away as though Zeus was really pissed at Bruce. I was in turned pissed at my Bruce-besotted wife for dragging me 200 miles (actually, 173) from my VT farm and beloved Kubota to suffer through all this so I could watch a FOF/fellow old fart (okay, he's "only" 58) prance around as though he still thought he was 28.

Well, the storm abated, The Boss showed up—and I, one of Earth's newest Bruce Groupies by midnight, was mesmerized by the most amazing piece of performance art of any sort I've ever seen (65.8 years) or ever expect to see. Three+ hours, non-flagging energy, no intermission at all—he ran to a little table and threw ice water on himself a couple of times without breaking stride. If ever there was a time when the word "excellence" was not hyperbole, this was it.

The repertoire was great, but so what. The passion & energy & performance [P.E.P., "pep"—God help me] per se was the point, the whole point, and nothing but the point.

I really don't want to Blog this—I want to savor it forever & ever! To hell with Cirque du Soleil—or IBM in the early 1980s! I never want to use the word "Excellence" with a cap "E" again other than in ref to Bruce. Gillette.0802.2008.

Bruce was amazing!
The E Street Band was amazing!
The IMAG direction was amazing!
Sitting in Row #19 was amazing!

From a review by W. Zachary Malinowski in the Sunday Providence [RI] Journal:

"Last night, the hardest working man in rock-n-roll came to Gillette Stadium for
something like his 95th*-concert since last fall's release of Magic, his latest
CD. The tour kicked off in October in Hartford and has taken the band across the
United States and Canada and twice to Europe. ...

"There's an old adage among diehard fans of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street
Band that goes something like this: there are two types of people in the world,
those who love The Boss and those who have never seen him perform live. ...

"Sure, at age 58, Springsteen has slowed down, but not as much as the rest of us.
He still races around and slides across the stage. He pours his heart and soul
into each performance as if he's trying to convince each ticket holder that this
is an event that he is going to make you remember the rest of your life. If you
didn't like the last song, well, he's going to play the next one even HARDER!
In a time of mortgage foreclosures, layoffs, and $4-per-gallon gas prices,
Springsteen makes sure that each of the 60,000-plus fans in football stadiums
is getting their money's worth. ..."

*TP: Holy shit! ("Everybody" says I have high energy—forget it!)

For what little it's worth, I've added a trio of Tom-pics, from my set of 225, to this Post, and one to the next.

Dear God, I'm Tired

I performed a brutal brush cutting-landscaping chore this morning in 90-degree heat. I truly pushed my ancient body to the limit and beyond.

But I got it done.
Or did I?

As I packed up my tools, I took a final look at what I'd done. Fine and dandy, but it was still a tiny-tiny-bit ragged here and there. Problem was, in the literal sense I didn't have an ounce of energy left. "F%^# it, I'll get it later" I said to myself and turned on the engine of my 4-wheel-drive Kubota.

I sat there a minute, dripping with sweat, and then I turned off the engine. With every muscle screaming in agony (I do not exaggerate—or so it feels), I got out of the Kubota, gathered a couple of tools, and spent the next 20 minutes doing that final touch on the job—and then just a little more, and a little more.

While the vignette is unmistakably self-serving, it is also one of those "reminders of the obvious" worth reminding you of. Namely, one cannot overestimate, in, say, our project work "the last two-percenter." That person who, at 2 a.m. takes one final look at the presentation to the Board tomorrow, and discovers that two key numbers are transposed on the footnote on Slide 47—and then looks "one last time" when she returns at 5:45 a.m. The carpenter who, finished, adds one final touch that alters the character of the cabinet he's spent two weeks building, and then hauls the piece back to his shop for a significant (to him) revision. Etc.

Sometimes we call the last two-percenter a "pain in the ass." True, but no one is of greater importance to the success of what we do. Funny thing, I felt less tired and achy after my "last two percent" drill than when I started it.

OMG, A Positive Airline Story!

Never thought I'd be caught saying something nice about an airline, but here goes. Was scheduled to fly United from SF to Macau, via Taipei. Was indulging myself with a 1st class seat. But transfer process in Taipei smelled nightmarish.

Looking around for alternatives I found EVA Airways. (My travel agent-Goddess had booked it as a very second "safety choice." (My contracts require a backup.) I don't pretend to be omniscient, but I'm a little leery of airlines I've never heard of after several million miles and several million years of flying. At the EVA website, though, I had the opportunity to go to a neutral site for customer comments—while a couple were minor complaints, the vast majority were very positive. Given the comments and the fact that the connecting process in Taipei appeared to be painless—we booked EVA about eight hours before I was to leave.

Enough of the build-up. Bottom line, top line, middle line: A fantastic experience. Flew business class—$7,500 (no bull) less than United. Everyone, as in everyone, had great attitudes. Check-in painless and positive. Lounges great in SF and Taipei. Transfer in Taipei very easy. And on and on. All together, a rare A+ experience.

(Guess what airline I'm flying back to Boston?)

(FYI fellow ignoramuses: EVA was launched in 1989 with a $3 billion aircraft order. It is a sister of the much older, Taipei-based Evergreen Marine Corporation, the 4th largest containership outfit in the world. I'm slightly embarrassed that Evergreen Marine is a competitor to my hosts at ZIM!)

Excellence Always

To wrap up our series of eight videos, we've chosen, of course, the topic of excellence. In this video (3 minutes, 44 seconds) filmed by Skillsoft, Tom asks, "If not excellence, what?" What else should you be doing with your time, your life? He agrees with Thomas Watson, Sr., the talented early leader of IBM, that you should make a personal commitment never again to do anything that is not excellent.

Excellence Always from Tom Peters on Vimeo.

[To get a transcript of Tom's message, you can download a PDF file here.]

I'll Miss You! (I Already Do.)

There is a little bistro, Café Vanille, about 100 yards from my Boston house where you'll find me a couple of days every couple of weeks. The coffee is good to great (and 100 times better than my own), the croissants pure delight.

And they open at 6 a.m. No small thing for an early riser.

But that's not the point of this post. Rather, it is to say a few words about a woman I love but whose name I don't know. And the tragedy of her leaving me for good.

Of course I ought to know her name—but I don't. (Nor she mine.)

But here's what I do know:

(1) She comes (came) in about 4 a.m. to get things ready.
(2) She appears to be very efficient at what she does-did.
(3) She lights up my life, rain or snow or sleet or hail, gloomy or sunny, at 90°F and -5°F.

She is definitely not "chirpy." (I'd guess she's 45, an age by which chirpiness is highly suspect, by my lights.) It's just that we always exchange a few pleasant sentences, she seems to enjoy what she does, and she brings along a good (good, not great) attitude day in and day out.

I emphasize "good but not great" because, at 6 a.m., I'm not looking for "Let's go out and kick ass, guys." I'm looking for solid and engaged and sociable-friendly and gettin' the job done with everyday pleasure.

Her solidness and spirit were just the tonic I needed—as much as the caffeine. And she provided it again and again and then again.

She's gone now, and I miss her terribly (this was my first morning without her), and I didn't know her name. That's not all bad either, in a funny way. It's not that "Mary's gone—alas." It's that this person whose name I don't know who in a solid-quiet way launched my days on a sound (not giddy) basis is not in situ anymore.

As always (alas!), I also have an ulterior motive in telling this story. It is to remind us that business ("life," too, of course) rises or falls on the nature and character of what the great SAS boss, Jan Carlzon, called "moments of truth"—those fleeting moments of true human contact that define our enterprise's excellence—or lack thereof.

Thus our goal, perhaps primary goal, in every flavor of business of every size, is to "MTMOT"—Manage To Moments Of Truth. Every decision about hiring, firing, supervision, training, systems development is to be designed for and brought immediately and directly to bear on the "production" of Moments Of Truth. My beloved friend from Café Vanille is poster woman for the possible impact if one gets it "right."

So that's my professional message. As to my personal one, what higher tribute to any person than to say that day in and day out they brought a little sunlight into others' (mine—one other!) lives via the most fleeting moments of contact. I repeat, not cheeriness, chirpiness, or blinding light—just a dab of predictable friendly interaction that invariably pushed the (my) day in the right direction—or at least kept it from heading down the wrong road.

Back to business. Look for, desperately pursue, settle for nothing less than such folks—they are surely not a dime, or even a dollar, a dozen. But they are there and if you will take the trouble to seek them out and then show your occasional appreciation for what they do, Excellence, I predict, will be within your grasp. (And quite possibly a bushel of profit to go along with it.)

When I think of the sorts of interactions I describe above, two quotes come to mind:

"Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart."—Henry Clay, American statesman

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."—Philo of Alexandria

If we could truly appreciate those two sentiments, and incorporate them into, as businesspeople, our enterprises' DNA, I think it would make a world of difference—and be the ultimate "blue ocean."

Happy weekend!

A Personal Top Ten Tom Quotes from London

Further to Valarie's "tuck it in" clip from Tom's London speech, here's my personal top ten takeaway thoughts from another mega happening in London. Tom, sorry if these are not quite verbatim. I did my best. You deliver the hits faster than I can scribble them down!

1. Excellence comes from human beings doing things of value that customers find memorable.

2. Remember. You are the only human being in the world who can help this particular customer at this particular moment in time.

3. The thing that keeps a business ahead of the competition is excellence in execution.

4. Brand inside is more important than brand outside for sustained success.

5. Leaders' careers will usually be determined by their handling of one or two critical events that no one could possibly anticipate or plan for.

6. Make sure that you spend your time on the things you say are your priorities.

7. Tuck the shower curtain in and give away two-cent candy!

8. It's remarkable how quickly an excellent culture can be torn apart by poor management.

9. Irrelevance comes from always doing the things you know how to do in the way you've always done them.

10. If you love your company and love what you do, you will serve your customers better—period!

Enjoy!

Tucking the Shower Curtain

I was lucky to get to London for the Tom event yesterday. Repeating his message from this blog post, Tom told the story about Conrad Hilton, founder of Hilton hotels. At a gala celebrating his life, he was asked, "What was the most important lesson you've learned in your long and distinguished career?" His reply was, "Remember to tuck the shower curtain inside the bathtub."

At first glance, one may think, that's it? But, think about it ... paying attention to detail makes all the difference when we are trying to achieve excellence. When we miss the little things, we miss the opportunity to achieve excellence; we fall just short of it.

My question of the day is, "What shower curtain do you need to tuck in?"

Wow!

Got my foot caught in power cord, here in my Las Vegas hotel room. Hence, my computer did not just "fall off a table" three feet high—it flew (!!) off the table, landing about three, or perhaps more, feet away. It "took a licking and kept on ticking." Hooray for my Panasonic CF-W5 TOUGHBOOK!

Dr Franklin "Gives Good Tea"

As you recall I offered up last week Excellence for "The Rest of Us." This weekend I wrote an alternate introduction: "Dr Franklin 'Gives Good Tea': America Defeats Great Britain!" It's attached.

Wrong.
Thirty Times Over.

While on holiday in New Zealand ... I got to thinking. As time goes by, "one" (me) tends to complexify one's approach to almost everything. The innocence (and clarity) of "days gone by" is blurred. I know that I am "guilty as charged." (By me.) And I think most of the other "gurus" (horrid term, but it's become part of the biz language) have also gotten away from reality. Hence, I began taking notes for a book-like "thing" that is not, in fact, a book. I titled it:

Excellence for "The Rest Of Us":
A "Book" for "Real People," Working in "The Real World" in 2008

The book-that's-not-a-book begins with a Thirty Count Indictment of "guruworld." I have provided 30 contrasting pairs, "Guru focus" versus "RW," Real World. Below I am offering the list, FYI.

The "Indictment" is the opener of a 62-page (so far) "paper" (that's not a book). Attached you will find the entire 62-page, 19,000-word plus document.

Enjoy!
(Or not.)
More to come!

[If you wonder about the origin of "all this," perhaps the sign, discovered on a beach on Golden Bay, New Zealand, will offer a hypothesis.]

Guru focus versus the "real world":

Guru focus: Big companies and attendant first-order, industry-redefining strategic issues.
Real World: Most of us, still, in 2008, don't work for Big Companies; we labor in "SMEs," Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. (Or the likes of government agencies.) And if we are in a big company or agency, most of our focus is the 17-person department in which we labor. (As to "SMEs," Germany is, ahead of China, the planet's #1 exporter, thanks mainly to focused, high-end middle-sized companies, the Mittlestand enterprises.)

Guru focus: Public corporations.
RW: Most of us work in privately owned companies. (Or in those government agencies.)

Guru focus: Cool industries.
RW: Most of us aren't in "Cool" industries, we do pretty ordinary stuff—like my pal, Larry Janesky, who makes a buck, and then another ($60 million, actually), creating "dry basements," that are free of toxic mold and can be used as a spare room or for a playroom or storing anything and everything; or Australian Jim Penman, who has over 2,500 franchises worldwide doing such things as walking dogs, washing dogs, and installing antennae.

Guru focus: "Excellence" is reserved for GE and GE and GE (or Google or, until last week, Boeing).
RW: "Excellence," bar none, is the fabulous, friendly, informative, instantly responsive pharmacy next door that takes on docs and insurance companies with vigor and usually victory. (Gary Drugs on Charles Street in Boston, for me.)

Guru focus: Boss-less, flat, friction-free, self-defining organizational settings.
RW: Most of us have "bosses." Most of us are assigned tasks.

Guru focus: "Getting ahead" means becoming a "Brand You," in a world where what our peers think of us is more important than the Boss's evaluation.
RW: Most of us still must cater to our bosses to get ahead.

Guru focus: "Cover boy" CEOs with G-4s, trophy wives, and the kids from all three marriages in prep schools with tuitions starting at $50K.
RW: Most of us work for government agencies or in schools or fire departments or in private companies perhaps run by the "millionaire next door," who owns two suits, a 2006 Lexus, stops in the coffee shop on the way to work, and sends his kids to public school.

Guru focus: New "virtual organization" forms of doing business; workplaces with hierarchy are "so yesterday."
RW: Most of us work amidst a rather clear "hierarchy" as depicted on a standard organization chart. (Though there are probably a few less layers then there were a few years ago.) (Want hierarchy? Try Home Depot.)

Guru focus: Creative right-brain weirdos, "with it" in these odd times.
RW: The majority of us are not "new age creatives," but are occasionally quite clever ... and pretty good at "blocking and tackling" in order to "get done what needs to be done."

Guru focus: The immediate threat, to millions upon millions, of being "outsourced."
RW: Most of us aren't especially threatened by the prospect of having our jobs outsourced to India or China or Romania.

Guru focus: Global enterprises "playing in the big league," in a "flat world."
RW: Many (most) of us are only marginally affected by globalization, and our firms don't sell more than a modest share of their products or, especially, services beyond our national borders. (The primary reach of the 18-person accountancy in a mid-sized city of 84,000 is perhaps three miles.)

Guru focus: A world where "the Web is everything, changes everything."
RW: Most of us haven't had our world turned anything like "upside down" by the Web, though the Web has surely had a significant impact. (We communicate with the plumber by Blackberry email from our car, but he's still 5 hours late!)

Guru focus: Our ability to be in instant communication with anyone, anywhere.
RW: Use email, but still practice MBWA—Managing By Walking Around.

Guru focus: An encompassing IS-IT strategy, with everything wired to everything else.
RW: While integrating IS is very important, most of us muddle through, trying to ensure that the IT-enhanced bits (the front-line sub-systems) are marvels of simplicity that deliver the goods for those front-line folks and their internal-external customers.

Guru focus: Strategic planners and CEOs desperately seeking "blue oceans."
RW: Most of us don't spend much or any of our day making grand plans. Never have. Never will.

Guru focus: Thinking "outside the box," of course.
RW focus: Most of us obsess on "doing," pretty much inside the box. (There are enough damn problems in the box—pissed off customers of long standing, etc.)

Guru focus: Complex "systemic change."
RW: Most of us believe in and spend our time doing on-the-cheap, rapid experimentation, picking off the "low-hanging fruit," muddling our way through to big change.

Guru focus: Imposing words-phrase such as "business models," "scalable," "strategic talent management," "customer-retention management," and "knowledge-management paradigm."
RW: Most of us try to use everyday language such as "the way we make a buck" (instead of "business model"), "let's grow this sucker" (not "Is it scalable?"), "hire good people and treat 'em well and give 'em a chance to shine and thank 'em for the stuff they do" (rather than "strategic talent management"), "bust our ass to keep our customers happy to keep 'em coming back" (instead of "customer-retention management"), and "share the stuff you learn with everybody ASAP, don't hoard it" (rather than "executing a knowledge-management paradigm").

Guru focus: Best data base + sexiest algorithms win in our customer-centric enterprise.
RW: Most of us spend our time on "trivial" acts of relationship building with customers, suppliers, leaders in our community, etc.

Guru focus: The relentless pursuit of "synergies."
RW: Most of us focus, focus, focus in order to stand a chance of succeeding in the marketplace. (Those astounding German "Mittlestand" companies again, or Larry Janesky, the dry-basement guy.)

Guru focus: Marketing sleight of hand!
RW focus: Sales! Sales! Sales!

Guru focus: Put the customer first!
RW focus: Put the front-line employee and the front-line manager co-first! (In order to maximize the odds of repeat business.)

Guru focus: Acquisitions and mergers aimed at expanding our "reach" and "market penetration" and "market share" amidst a zero-sum game, thus reducing risk courtesy a "diverse" portfolio and smothering ("killing") the competition.
RW: Play from our strengths, work like hell to enhance those strengths, and survive-thrive via "organic" growth and executing very, very well.

Guru focus: Totally "new rules for a new game," dramatic new "management tools" that "change everything."
RW: Most of us are learning new things, but nothing that's particularly "revolutionary" as we labor mightily (fulltime) "just" to "get stuff done," improve relationships, find good folks and keep 'em by showing appreciation and respect, and providing opportunities to get ahead.

Guru focus: Hiring PhD mathematicians to design obscure algorithms that allow the creation of the likes of "risk free" derivatives and, hence, stunning "competitive advantage."
RW: For most of us, snappy execution of the "timeless" "basics" is Job #1. (And Job #2. And Job #3.)

Guru focus: A fetish for the diabolically clever.
RW: Most of us know that "relentless" pounding and pounding and pounding, and then pounding some more, on those Golden Basics wins.

Guru focus: Built to last.
RW: Most of us muddle through, trying to make it to the end of the week while keeping our customers content.

Guru focus: Disruptive Innovation is #1.
RW: We "invent" everyday "tools," such as Xeroxed (paper) checklists, aimed at preventing "line infections" and thus saving thousands-of-lives-per-year of ICU patients, in the U.S. (In a similar vein, as it were, the British observers estimate that over ten thousand lives per year could be saved in hospitals by providing most patients with compression socks that help prevent deep-vein thrombosis.) (Call it "un-disruptive innovation," with inordinate power?!)

Guru focus: Describe "new age" mortgage bankers, loaded with "intellectual capital" and "integrated systems" who "package" loans as soon as possible and sell them to financial service institutions who create and sell derivatives based on the packaged mortgages—which are in turn re-packaged as super-derivatives.
RW: As, say, a young mortgage-lending officer in a town of 18,000, whose Dad runs a local car dealership, take Mary and John to lunch to get a grasp of who they are before lending them $450,000; and after the loan, call or drop by every, say, three or six months to see how things are going—even if all payments have been on time.

Guru focus: "Changing demographics," "the new Gen X world," as many discrete market segments as there are customers.
RW (I wish): Our primary customers [85% of the time] are women—find the right team [lotsa women in senior management] and go for it. We also, to make a buck, have gotta aim more at boomers or near-boomers, and "geezers" [who collectively have all the dough], and less on callow, so-called "trendsetter" youth.

There's my thirty—and I plead "guilty-as charged" to many-most of them!

Future Shape of Quality

Tom Peters believes that the term "excellence" requires wholesale redefinition, if the word is to be applicable to businesses in the future. "Perhaps, excellent firms don't believe in excellence—only in constant improvement and constant change," says Tom. "That is, excellent firms of tomorrow will cherish impermanence—and thrive on chaos." This is a long way from the "7S" model set out in Tom's seminal book, In Search of Excellence.

To my mind, the words excellence and quality have always had similar connotations. So, one might reasonably assume that what's true for future excellence might also be true for future quality, and vice versa? Apparently not, it would seem! I have been working recently with one of the UK's most prestigious authorities on Quality. I suspect their "body of knowledge" on the subject of quality would rival that of most similar bodies around the world. However, when you get past all the contemporary language, their principal focus is still the application of retrospective static models of quality, which are supervised and certified by third-party process-conformance checking. It seems that a quality company can still market concrete life jackets providing they are all made the same way, all carry a stern danger-to-health warning, and the company has a clear complaints procedure!

Reading again through the string of interesting comments on Mike Neiss's recent "Hard Work Matters" blog and the debate about how Future Shape of the Winner compares with the Malcolm Baldrige quality award system has made we wonder if there are any quality assessment methodologies out there that can calibrate the impermanence requirement of future excellent companies. Is there a quality assessment tool that can accommodate hot words like "cherish" and "thrive"?

Oh, Henry, That's So, So Yesterday!

Henry Ford gave us the production line!
America henceforth ruled the world!

So goes the conventional wisdom concerning our astounding industrial might. Well, there's not much doubt about either the "industrial might" or the power projected thereby ... but the Henry Ford contribution may be a bit specious.

I love Boston. SF. L.A. London. Paris.
But my favorite city is, no contest ... Venice.
(Where I spent Christmas 2007.)

"Wee" Venice was a world power for about 600 years, and more or less ruled the world for perhaps 300 or 400 of those years (e.g., it conquered and controlled Constantinople for centuries). Venice cobbled together the first "imperialist" empire. Its "core competencies" (translation: strengths, stuff it was good at) were trading skills and the projection thereof courtesy a peerless navy.

The source of the Venetian Navy's excellence?
Mass production!

The Arsenale was Venice's highly fortified shipyard. The base procedure for shipbuilding was straightforward labor specialization in a fully developed production line format.

The Arsenale's product?

The world's most powerful and best-armed warships.

Turned out at the rate of ... one plus per day!

1/Day!
1/Day!
1/Day!

I love water!
I love strong navies!
I love skilled traders!
I love Venice!

I love the repeated stories of lasting (centuries) world dominance emanating from astonishingly small places with absolutely no natural resources but an abiding commercial-trading instinct (e.g., Venice, Rotterdam-Amsterdam, Lisbon, London).

I love the fact that the "excellence" of such places was soundly and more or less exclusively based on superior "distributed-decentralized network management" (traders, bourses, mapmakers, navies, old-style "internets" with numerous hyperlinks) emanating from highly developed "intellectual capital" and an untrammeled, incredibly competitive-Darwinian "entrepreneurial instinct."

(Alas, the Arsenale is in a state of disrepair, so you'll have to settle for a generic picture of Venice taken at sunset on Christmas Eve.)

MVPs, 2007

For what it's worth, my heroes (& goats) of 2007

CEO: Carly Fiorina. HP, not IBM, became the first $100 billion infotech company this year. Primary reason? The highly contentious, and surprisingly successful, Compaq acquisition and integration. (And, God knows, I don't ordinarily cheer such acquisitions—though I did, in this case, from the start.) Tenacious champion? Carly Fiorina! HP is now seen as a "consumer powerhouse." Laughable idea a few years ago. Transformation agent: Ms Fiorina. HP is "cool" with scintillating designs. Laughable idea just a few years ago. Transformation agent? Carly. New and not so nerdy "culture." Architect? Carly Fiorina. (And said cultural transformation, frankly, makes Welch's work at GE and Gerstner's at IBM a cakewalk by comparison.)

Do I give Ms Fiorina uniformly high marks? No. Does her successor, Mark Hurd, get significant credit? Absolutely. But make no mistake, Mr Hurd is executing Ms Fiorina's bold strategy and working with her altered culture. Period.

CEO: Arnold Schwarzenegger. President Schwarzenegger has made a miracle in my beloved California Republic. Not only has he done "great stuff"—he's retrieved California's swagger and indomitable spirit. Go, Guvenator!

Company: Basement Systems Inc. Love it when there is a superstar performer in a mundane business. Founder-CEO Larry Janesky has built a $50 million ++, fast-growing enterprise in the biz of providing dry basements—that are free of nasty mold and available as another (big) room in one's home. (Also see Larry's bestselling Dry Basement Science.)

Company: Jim's Group of Australia. Ditto. (You can see my biases here.) Jim Penman has 2,500+ franchises worldwide, doin' the stuff that busy working families don't have time to do—such as walkin' and washin' the family dog! (Also see, downloadable at Jim's website, What Will They Franchise Next? The Story of Jim's Group.)

Companies: Germany's Mittelstand—middle-sized firms. These high-value-added, niche superstars make Germany the world's #1 exporter! (The hell with the Giants.)

Companies and People: Private firms, Millionaires next door. The "gurus" never talk about the private firms—that constitute over half the enormous U.S. economy, and outperform the Monsters in the process. Our "gurus" ("our" includes me!) likewise never talk about that ordinary fellow-CEO up the hill running a biz that does uncool things, dressing in uncool garb, going to Disneyworld on holiday—and sporting a bank account to die for.

Person: Muhammad Yunus. Okay, I'm late to the party, but I didn't do MVPs last year, when Mr Yunus and his Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing and executing the practice of micro-lending. More cheers still to the 94% women entrepreneur-borrowers (and payers back!).

Market: Me! Boomers. Geezers. By the tens upon tens of millions. Money at the ready. (Lots and lots of. And time to spend it.) And insanely underserved by one and almost all. Here's how I put it in my presentations: "We are the Aussies & Kiwis & Americans & Canadians. We are the Western Europeans & Japanese. We are the fastest growing, the biggest, the wealthiest, the boldest, the most (yes) ambitious, the most experimental & exploratory, the most different, the most indulgent, the most difficult & demanding, the most service & experience obsessed, the most vigorous, (the least vigorous,) the most health conscious, the most female, the most profoundly important commercial market in the history of the world—and we will be the Center of your universe for the next twenty-five years. We have arrived!"

Message: Wise up! Wake up! Get rich!

Goats: Bill Sharpe et other "quants." The super-sophisticated mathematically marvelous quants with their derivatives of derivatives of derivatives promised us the end of systemic economic risk. Whoops—they gave us sleepwalkers just the opposite. When a couple of folks in Podunk missed a mortgage payment, the skyscraper of cards imploded. Bill Sharpe was among the Nobel-winning economists who took us down this prickly primrose path. May the milk in their Christmas puddings be curdled.

Hero: Warren Buffett. Mr Basics wondered about the value of the dull & dreary underlying asset (Mo and Maureen of Podunk's capacity to pay down their "cutrate" mortgage), and warned us about the freaky financial instruments that sat atop such "assets." Chalk another one up for Mr Buffett.

Chief Imagineer: Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai. Just returned from Dubai. In my seminars I call its stunning development, on a desert flyspeck, the "single greatest act of human imagination in my lifetime." Congratulations to Sheikh Mohammed and his late father, Sheikh Maktoum.

Process & Simplicity: Checklists!! Complexifiers often rule—in part the byproduct of far too many "consultants" in the world, determined to demonstrate the fact that their IQs are higher than yours or mine. Enter Johns Hopkins' Dr Peter Pronovost. Dr P was appalled by the fact that 50% of folks in ICUs (90,000 at any point—in the U.S. alone) develop serious complications as a result of their stay in the ICU, per se. He also discovered that there were 179 steps, on average, required to sustain an ICU patient every day. His answer: Dr P "invented" the ... ta-da ... checklist! With the religious use of simple paper lists, prevalent ICU "line infection" errors at Hopkins dropped from 11% to zero—and stay-length was halved. (Results have been consistently replicated, from the likes of Hopkins to inner-city ERs.) "[Dr Pronovost] is focused on work that is not normally considered a significant contribution in academic medicine," Dr Atul Gawande, wrote in "The Checklist" (New Yorker, 1210.07). "As a result, few others are venturing to extend his achievements. Yet his work has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the last decade." (I've attached a "Special Presentation" on this topic.)

Healthcare Providers: Planetree Alliance Members. The "Planetree Model" of "patient-centric" (ugly word, that) healthcare is the Real Deal. Asked to comment on the Planetree Alliance earlier this year, here's what I said:

"All sane persons agree that 'healthcare needs an overhaul.' And that's where the agreement stops. Healthcare issues are thorny, and system panaceas are about as likely as the sun rising in the West. But there is good news here and there—and great news courtesy the Planetree Model.

"In the midst of ceaseless gnashing of teeth over 'healthcare issues,' the patient and frontline staff often get lost in the shuffle. Enter Planetree. While oceanic systemic solutions remain out of reach, Planetree provides a remarkable demonstration of what healthcare—with the patient at the center—can be all about; and is all about, among Planetree Alliance members.

"I know this may sound ridiculous, but everything about the 'model' works. It is great for patients and their families—and is truly about humanity and healing and health and longterm wellness, not just a 'fix' for today's problem. It is great for staff—Planetree-Griffin is rightly near the top of the 'best places to work in America' list, year in and year out. And Planetree also works as a 'business model'—any effectiveness measure you can name is in the Green Zone at Griffin.

"For 25 years my 'gig' has been 'excellence.' Put simply, there is no better exemplar of customer-centered, employee-friendly excellence, in any industry, than Griffin-Planetree. The Planetree model works—and, in my extensive work in the health sector, I 'sell' it shamelessly, and pray that my clients are taking it all in."

(I meant it—every word.) (See "Special Presentation" attached.)

Healthcare Heroes: Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Dear God, what a history. As I said to the dean while visiting to make a presentation, "To make the alumni honor role, it seems, you must have saved a million lives or so"—and I'm not sure I was exaggerating. I'd add that the talk was my favorite of the year—I've never seen so many idealists under one roof! (Students, faculty, others.) By the by, hats waaaaaay off to Mike Bloomberg for his astounding support!)

Book: How She Does It: How Women Entrepreneurs Are Changing the Rules of Business Success, by Margaret Heffernan. America's 10 million++ women business owners and their impact on the economy remains our most under-reported business story. As Ms Heffernan puts it: "The growth and success of women-owned businesses is one of the most profound changes taking place in the business world today." Congrats to these gutsy heroes—by the million.

Book: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. We all can acquire literally millions of "business partners" with imaginative use of the Web. Collaboration on an almost infinite scale has arrived, for the wise.

Book, Instant Classic: The Black Swan: Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Black Swan told us about the likes of the sub-prime mess long before it happened. Most variation in outcomes (e.g., longterm profit or loss) is the product of a tiny handful of weird (outlier) events. NNT provides example after compelling example—and also illustrates the total impotence of traditional planning methods to cope with black swans.

That's it.

Pow-wow

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the second annual Author Pow-wow, hosted by 800-CEO-READ. This was an example of Tom's "Have Yous" list brought to life, vividly. 800-CEO-READ, a creative company that is serious about business books, decided it would be a good idea to bring together neophyte authors with the industry experts who can help them. A cynic (a.k.a. Jack Covert, albeit tongue in cheek) would say that they're tired of repeating themselves when speaking to individual authors, but it was obvious that their intention was to challenge their colleagues to seek excellence.

The invited experts weren't interested in stroking the authors' egos. Instead, seasoned professionals explained the ins and outs of business publishing and the speaking industry in ways that challenged common misperceptions. The presentations ranged from solid basics like revisiting core writing skills to the value of a good publicist and speaking agent to how to use the blogosphere to your advantage.

The message that rang loudest over the two days was the need for platform development—finding and honing ways to connect with one's audience. That seems like a fairly obvious branding message, but for people who have been focusing intently on written content, it requires serious gear-shifting to raise their heads from book writing and start marketing themselves. Most would-be authors think that if they can just land a good publishing deal, they can sit back and watch the royalties fill their bank accounts. That's very far from the truth. Publishers expect authors to not only submit a compelling manuscript but a public relations plan including an online presence (for more about this, see John Moore's post nicely excerpting Jeff Gomez's Print Is Dead).

It's clear that the folks at 8CR have an affection for mavericks. The event itself was held at the spectacularly inspiring Catalyst Ranch and the intensity with which people connected made clear how passionate we all are about sharing ideas. Have you planned an event that pushes your colleagues/employees/customers to the next level lately?

If you'd like to hear more about the event, check out the descriptions (numerous, but then, this was a conference about writing) from Kate, Barbara, Raj, Phil, Jose, Dan, Nick, David, Mike, Erika, and Kevin. For photos: Phil, Jose, 8CR.

Keep your eye out for these authors (and can you find the 5 Cool Friends?):
Erika Andersen
Greg Alexander
Jose Castillo
Kevin Eikenberry
Phil Gerbyshak
Joanne Gordon
Jackie Huba
Joe Heuer
Mike Kanazawa
Alexander Kjerulf
Steve Little
Ben McConnell
Pamela Miles
Robert Mintz
Jack Mitchell
Susan Quandt
David Meerman Scott
Michael Stallard
Dan Roam
John Rosen
Rajesh Setty
AnnaMaria Turano
Bill Welter
Steve Yastrow

The experts:
Ray Bard - Bard Press
Mark Bloomfield - Harvard Business School Press
Barbara Cave Henricks - Cave Henricks Communications
Mark Fortier - Fortier Public Relations
Nick Morgan - Public Words
Gerry Sindell - ThoughtLeaders Intl.
Les Tuerk - BrightSight Group
Dennis Welch - Cave Henricks Communications
Susan Williams - Jossey-Bass

Profound thanks to the remarkably talented team at 8CR for this experience!

For Ben Only

If it weren't for my stepson Ben, a devout Patriots fan (in the true meaning of "devout"), and Cathy and Erik, I would order a pox on the Pats—leading 42-10 at the end of three quarters, why the 14 additional points in Q4? (Patriots 56, Bills 10.)

For Baseball Fans Only (Maybe)

Doesn't get much better than this, extracted from the 29 October Forbes, "Thoughts On the Business of Life":

"I've come to the conclusion that the two most important things in life are good friends and a good bullpen."—Bob Lemon

(Lemon was a great pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, and subsequently a successful manager.)

My Hunch

While the Rockies and the Red Sox are battling in the World Series, halfway around the world the Airbus A380, courtesy Singapore Air, will make its first commercial flight.

Here's betting that when aviation history is written 25 years from now the Boeing Dreamliner will be more or less forgotten—and the A380 will get its own chapter.

I can hear the howls now—and I won't be around 25 years from now to pick up-pay off the debt, or if I am hanging in, unlike Peter Drucker, I damn well won't be prattling on about management.

In any event, hats off to recently maligned Airbus and the service fanatics at Singapore Air!

Exceptions to Every Rule

You can be assured that this Blog will not distract readers with movie reviews. Nonetheless, I must break the implicit rule and report that I cannot remember when I laughed as hard, often to the point of choking, as I did last night while watching Death at a Funeral. Part of the joy was that the entire audience was in near hysterics for all 90 minutes of the performance—and we doubtless spurred one another on.

'Nuff said.

Happy Days!
(For Me.)

Last week I wondered, in a Post, why one would want to work for any of BusinessWeek's best companies for college grads—or, rather, best VERRRY BIGGGGG companies. Musta been listenin' over at Dow Jones. (Just kidding.) Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal, in a special section on small business, headlined with "Top Small Workplaces 2007."

Hooray!

Included: Alaska Wildland Adventures. Gentle Giant Moving. Cowden Associates. (Accounting, definitely not "Big Four.") Guerra DeBerry Coody. (Advertising-PR.) Healthwise. (Health info provider.) NRG Systems (Wind-measuring equipment—from Hinesburg VT.) Phelps County Bank. Etc.

The WSJ sub-head: "What Makes a Great Workplace? Among other things: having employees who feel empowered and convinced they have a future at the company." (See tomorrow's Post.)

Thanks, WSJ—you made my day!
(And I'm thinking of applying for a job—Hinesburg isn't that far away, and I'm a bit of a windbag.)

Fed Up.
But ...
(My Own Fault.)

Yesterday I was doing an interview with a journalist from Flanders. At one point he asked me about something I guess he'd found at Wikipedia, a reference to an article titled "Tom Peters' True Confessions," relative to In Search of Excellence. The callout, repeated on the cover of the magazine, was "We faked the data." It's my own fault that such a line ended up in print—though I could live without the guy who concocted it.

A few years ago, as I was working with Fast Company co-founder Alan Webber on the article, we were talking about In Search of Excellence, and the selection of companies for the book. In Jim Collins' Good to Great, he claims he started with a list of the top 1,000 companies (or some such) and, applying some hurdles (see below, re "hurdles"), came up with his sample. I said to Alan that we'd not done such a purported "scientific" thing. Instead, we'd gone around to McKinsey colleagues, academics, corporate types we knew, and so on, and asked about companies they thought were doing exceptional stuff (e.g., one of our neighboring firms was HP, then a fresh-caught $1 billion company—we put them on the list because they had a lot of out-of-the-ordinary practices, especially by 1979's standards). Thus, we were "unscientific" by some measures (scientific by the standards of "exploratory research," which this was) in developing a list of candidate companies. However, after we had our roughly 100 "nominees" we subjected them to steep long-term financial hurdles described in the book, and we were forced to prune the list to the final 43. And that's the story of our methodology, take it or leave it. Since our goal, demanded by our client, Siemens, was to find "interesting" "good" companies to analyze, we thought this was as good a way to go as any other—though there were, of course, a hundred ways we could have gone.

At some later point, Alan and I, in a rambling discussion, got onto the topic of "lies, damn lies, and statistics"—statistics, weird as it is, are a major hobby of mine. That's when I said something like, "Of course we know all this [Jim's way or ours] is to some extent phony baloney. That is, if you try enough variations of plausible, tough long-term financial hurdles—e.g., 10 years or 20 as the baseline—you can significantly influence the outcome." And that, of course, is true, as any business analyst of any seniority knows—change an assumption by a dab here and a smidgen there, and a questionable project looks like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—Defense acquisition projects being one glaring example. I suspect it was this latter discussion that may have influenced the headline writer.

So it goes, and thence it's my own damn fault. I unhesitatingly acknowledge that in the social sciences it's not too hard to reach varied results depending on the measures you decide to use. But that's a country mile from "We faked the data." So you can take that explanation, or leave it, but there it is.

Excellence!!!

Clay Buchholz! A no-hitter in his second start in the majors! The first rookie in Red Sox history to do it. The 21st rookie in major league baseball to do it. The third rookie since 1900 to throw a no-hitter in his first or second start. The 17th no-hitter ever by a Red Sox pitcher. The first since Derek Lowe's in 2002. And he's 23 years old. Wow!

This happened last night, September 1, 2007. You can read all about it at Boston.com. Congratulations, Clay!

P.S. We'd love it if all of you would post your congratulations to him in our comments.

The Big Train
Pulled Out Of The Station ...

One hundred years ago today, on 2 August 1907, Walter Johnson took the mound for the first of his 802 lifetime appearances for the Washington Senators baseball team. He lost that day, but went on to win 411 games with a fastball that may never have been equaled.

I grew up 30 miles from Washington, and saw my first major league game at Griffith Stadium in D.C., probably about 1949. Though some of my learned fellow baseball pals of that era were Christy Matthewson [NY Giants hall of fame pitcher] defenders, I was adamant that The Big Train, as he was called, was the best pitcher ever. In fact, I still am adamant.

So Happy 100, ghost of The Big Train.

(Why does this belong in this Blog? Because it's a gorgeous, hot summer day—and if you are not musing on Walter Johnson today, then in my book you've got a problem. And, since this is, in a sense, my "book" ...)

In Search of Excellence, Thoughts On, 25-year Perspective

[TP note: What follows, in shorthand-outline form was written by me to prep for an interview on a new book about the "halo effect"—which, as so many since 1982, takes aim at In Search of Excellence—which, of course, is immensely flattering 25 years later, when the book and I, by all rights, ought to be on the shelf gathering dust. Why did I take it so seriously? Simple, because it's interesting to think about "all this."]

*Book was impetus for:

    Excellence "Industry"
    Anti-Excellence "Industry"
    Multi-billion $$ "Management guru" INDUSTRY

*Don't take yourself too seriously!!!!! (Read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness—my bible.)
*MANAGEMENT IS NOT NOT NOT A "SCIENCE" (!!!!)
*TP to audiences: "If you followed In Search to a T you were obviously an idiot and deserved your sorry fate; it's simply meant to be 'helpful,' no more and no less. It's entirely up to you and your judgment as to how far to go, if anywhere." (Any idea/s taken to its/their extreme will get you in trouble—e.g., religious ones.)
*TP: "'Halo effect?' I WISH IT WERE TRUE!" (I.e, that "everyday" service industries treated their employees like Wegmans does.)
*Conjectures lead to refutations. (Duh.) (Popper, philosopher of science, Conjectures and Refutations) (Success stories vs failure stories; Freud/broken personalities vs. Maslow/healthy personalities)

*FYI, or, rather, for what it's worth, perhaps not much):

    Excellence Index: 1982-2002/Forbes.com
    [20th anniversary of Search]

    DJIA: $10,000 yields $85,500
    EI: $10,000 yields $140,050

    (Forbes/Excellence Index/Basket of 32 publicly traded stocks from In Search of Excellence)

    (Ever so many management book authors feel it's necessary to begin with "Most of the companies in In Search of Excellence failed." This is hardly "proof" that such an assertion is wrong, just "a little counter-evidence.")

* The "stuff" can't hurt (e.g., women, design, customers, people, MBWA, X-functional co-operation, soft is hard [numbers "soft," people-customer-execution orientation/obsession "hard"], EXCELLENCE per se as aspiration, action beats talk, screw-ups normal & necessary, flowers, "thank you," Enthusiasm, hire enthusiasts) "Tom, it [YPO seminar in '83] was a blinding flash of the obvious"—Manny Garcia, Burger King's #1 franchisee at the time)
(McKinsey "7-S model" [strategy, structure, staff, etc.] 8 "basics" of Search)

*Not RULES, but a little motivation/some "stuff" to get you (seminar attendee) going
*TP, 2007: "My principal goal is to remind you of stuff you already know, but which often gets lost in the course of taxing everyday affairs."

*CONTEXT! CONTEXT! CONTEXT! (1982's "Strategy obsession" vs our emphasis on Execution-"Organization"-"Organizational effectiveness")

*Didn't purport to be "Hard research." (Instead, "exploratory research"; i.e., taking a first look at an interesting notion)

*FYI:

Comment @ tompeters.com/June 2, 2007: "As an attendee of the CO-OP Financial Services Conference, I had the opportunity to see Tom's presentation on 6/1/07. For me, the man and the message were both truly inspiring. Tom helped remind me of why I decided to accept the CEO position at my credit union nearly seven years ago. His presentation also served as a much needed slap in the face by showing me how much I have unintentionally strayed from the original vision I was given. I have allowed the influences of generally well intended external forces to move me, and therefore my credit union, off track. As a result, we have become entirely too wrapped up with trying to be 'one of the big guys,' way too risk averse, afraid to fail and slow to act as a result of 'paralysis by analysis.' It's time to change all of that! Thanks very much and God bless!" (Posted by Wally Murray at June 3, 2007, 9:16 AM)

NOT MEANT TO IMPLY A "TYPICAL COMMENT," SIMPLY TO SUGGEST WHAT "THEY" CAN GET OUT OF "IT." (Will he follow up? God alone knows. And, sorry, not my problem—I live to stir things up; hey, one can only do so much, especially at 64 [64 = me, Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney—a little left in us old boys?])

[CM note: The article we link above is an excerpt from Knowledge@Wharton.]

Media Sighting

US News & World Report of 21 May 2007 has an article titled "The Best Business Books of All Time? Here Are the Choices of Our Panel of CEOs and Experts." Experts are the likes of Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, who recommends Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, mentioned here a couple of times. An erstwhile CEO in the group is Carly Fiorina, who names Re-imagine! among her selection of best business books ever. Thank you, Carly!

It's How You Tell 'Em!

The UK's Guardian newspaper is in the middle of presenting a truly fabulous mini-series of the best speeches of the 20th Century. Here is the list of speeches, that are being presented daily from 21st April – 4th May:

Winston Churchill, We shall fight on the beaches, June 4, 1940
John F Kennedy, Ask not what your country can do for you, January 20, 1961
Nelson Mandela, An ideal for which I am prepared to die, April 20, 1964
Harold Macmillan, No going back, February 3, 1960
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, March 4, 1933
Nikita Khrushchev, The cult of the individual, February 25, 1956
Emmeline Pankhurst, Freedom or death, November 3, 1913
Martin Luther King, Jr., I have a dream, August 28, 1963
Charles de Gaulle, The flame of French resistance, June 1940
Margaret Thatcher, The lady's not for turning, October 10, 1980
Jawaharlal Nehru, A tryst with destiny, August 14, 1947
Virginia Woolf, A room of one's own, 1928
Aneurin Bevan, We have to act up to different standards, December 5, 1956
Earl Spencer, The most hunted person of a modern age, September 6, 1997
[Some have audio; others don't. And to date, the first seven are available; the rest are to come.—CM]

You can read transcripts, as well as listen to the actual speeches at www.guardian.co.uk/greatspeeches. I've just listened to the Winston Churchill speech, which took place shortly after the Dunkirk Landings—it really conjoured up the spirit of the moment in a chilling way.

What do you think of the list—which do you think is the finest of them all, and is there any one that you would have added to that list?

Excellence! Everywhere!

I am in a daze!

I received a gorgeous book, Crawl Space Science: What to Have Done ... And Why, by Larry Janesky. The book has sold 115, 000 copies! Larry runs Basement Systems Inc., of Seymour, CT. The book is graphically brilliant (he gives credit to Re-imagine!), easy to use, astoundingly informative—and I got it just as Susan and I were in the midst of discussing a new use for our moldy basement.

Professionally, there is simply nothing I love ... LOVE ... more than Excellence in "impossible" places!!!

(Recall my recent riff on Jim Penman's Jim's Group—2,600 franchisees in Australia, NZ, UK. Cleaning. Dog washing. Handyman. Fencing. Paving. Pool care. Etc. Etc.)

Why, why, why do the likes of me and Jim Collins and Ram Charan keep using, almost exclusively, large, publicly traded companies as exemplars? Laziness? (Exception, touted here before: Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead Of Big—by Bo Burlingham.)

Go, Larry!
Go, Jim!
Go, Bo!

[NB: Did I mention that Larry's business has grown like Topsy, with revenue now topping $50,000,000!]

Stunning & Stunned

Movie reviews are not within the scope of this Blog. Until now. The Lives of Others. To do more than mention the name would require thousands of words. I cannot commend it highly enough; now, not on DVD—must be seen on the Big Screen. (My only elucidation will be to say that it was "one of those very rare ones" where literally not one word was heard upon the end of the film—and almost everyone sat, in stunned silence, until the end of the credit roll.)

Three Reviews: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9, Strategy + Business Magazine, and Sunday's Academy Awards

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Time: 4 minutes, 59 seconds

Links:
NaturallySpeaking 9
strategy + business
Academy Awards

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