Comments

Tom,

Do you have any data that documents the value your consulting has created over the past 20 years? Just curious...

~ Will

Posted by people.love.technology at February 1, 2005 5:06 PM

The bummer about Sears is, I wish it was the other way around and they took over KMART....seems like they could have turned the blue light RED!

Posted by Mike at February 1, 2005 5:52 PM

And 13,000 jobs (AT&T Deal). Gone! Vanished!

Maybe Daniel Pink should add another item in the Right brain discussion. Asia, Automation, Abundance, and Consolidation.

Posted by RTodd at February 1, 2005 6:02 PM

Great stuff, as always, Tom, but I keep chewing on whether we're talking about "vanished" or "evolved by market forces". I mean, in the (admittedly wacky) SBC/AT&T deal, it's not that 13,000 jobs have vanished, as RTodd suggests, is that the inevitable evolution of SBC-AT&T allows the company to be smaller and more efficient with its workforce. It's a dynamic tension: on one hand is a complex and rich business ecosystem with thousands of small competitors (think how radio used to be): thousands of redundant workers spread across all these firms. Move to a consolidated conglomeration of a few massive corporations (think Clear Channel) and suddenly the efficiencies of scale DO work and the entire industry works more efficiently. (Note, however, that I didn't say the end result was better for the end customer or consumer, however.)

Lest I sound hard-hearted, there are plenty of jobs and workers who are obsoleted every year. We don't have much need for gaslamp lighters, telephone dial manufacturing facilities and ethyl gasoline dispensers, for example, let alone COBOL programmers. It's the responsibility of the company to enable their workforce to evolve with the firm as best as possible, but it's also the responsibility of the worker to never stop training and learning, reinventing themselves every day. (And there's #51 for you, Tom: To Be Employed Tomorrow, You Need to Always Reinvent and Reimagine Yourself Today.)

Posted by Dave Taylor at February 1, 2005 6:23 PM

Maybe one of those 13,000 is a reinventer, reimagineer, psf, etc. Maybe in a few years, they will hand SBC a hefty invoice for thier services that they could have gotten for a small salary. I just hope we read about it.

Posted by RTodd at February 1, 2005 7:48 PM

That would be delicious irony, wouldn't it, RTodd. For what it's worth, companies let people go (or have people walk) just to hire them back the next week as a consultant all the time. I did just that when I left HP: I quit and within two months was consulting both to their R&D Labs and their Unix workstation marketing group, and I remember at the time thinking "why didn't you just give me a raise and let me do this stuff as an employee?" :-)

Posted by Dave Taylor at February 1, 2005 9:50 PM

The thing about synergy, the real kind, anyway, is that it cannot be predicted.

Synergy only works if first there is chemistry.

And you don't know what the chemistry is till you mix the two halves together.

To talk about synergy before you know if there's actual chemistry is intellectually dishonest.

But hey, yet one more 90's buzzword revealed to be hiding yet one more tangled web of human folly. Plus ca change...

Posted by hugh macleod at February 1, 2005 10:08 PM

Dave, sure it's "evolved by market forces" if you are G Bush or J Snow, and trying to run the economy as a whole. And it's a damn good thing for the economy. Period. On the other hand, for those who worry about management on a micro level, it is a clear failure on the part of AT&T, etc. Also of interest, and I can't find the stat at the monent, the Fortune500 company dropout rate has skyrocketed in the past decade or so; so increased volatility is taking its toll. Hey, you're talking to a Silicon Valey Boy ... we live & breathe Creative Destruction! As to workers, whether it's my "brand you" or Dan Pink's "free agent nation" or George Bush's "ownership society," we need tools to help people achieve independence from the nearly guaranteed lifetime employment "pact" that used to exsist with the likes of Ma Bell or Pa Gillette.

Posted by tom peters at February 2, 2005 12:22 AM

Will, absolutely no hard data. I've got a ton of letters, a memory of many who have said outrageous things about value added, an eighth-ton of critical comments, and the "market" fact that I'm almost always asked back. Fact is, after In Search of Excellence, I cut way back on my long-term consulting (of the McKinsey flavor), and do it these days with a very select few, based mostly on friendship. Any consultant who says they have hard data about economis value added is a bullshit artist of the first order. I call all clients and do extensive follow-up interviews, but that's all. I simply consider myself to be a three-decade, active duty player in the Great Contest of Ideas that are helping remake business.

Posted by tom peters at February 2, 2005 12:31 AM

Hugh, I'm more or less a fan of buzzwords--it means that lots of people are actively playing with concepts. Implementation is obviously essential, but so are ideas. Probably 90% of Deming-ites failed to make a splash, but the decades of "quality buzz" (1,000 flavors!) has been worth its weight in something more valuable than gold. (Eg I'm a huge fan of the dot-com bubble. We learned an incredible amount in an insanely short period of time, millions picked up personal "intellectual capital," and it probably only cost a trillion bucks. And changed the world.)

Posted by tom peters at February 2, 2005 12:39 AM

Hugh, did I ever thank you for the wonderful JP Morgan story?

Posted by tom peters at February 2, 2005 12:40 AM

Just curious - all these instances -- where does that leave built to last???? or can we ever build to last?

Posted by R.Srinivasan at February 2, 2005 3:22 AM

No worries, Tom, you're very welcome ;-)

Yeah, it's a great story. Can't remember where I first heard it... methinks it was NPR.

Posted by hugh macleod at February 2, 2005 7:00 AM

Please could someone post a reminder or link to the JP Morgan story referred to above. Much appreciated.

Posted by Michael at February 2, 2005 7:45 AM

Hugh, I've got JP on a slide with a citation to you & your post at tp.com.

Posted by tom peters at February 2, 2005 9:40 AM

The question I have about this huge merger is whether or not they'll toss their technology infrastructures and create a new, cutting edge core platform or will they spend the next few years of IT budgets focused on integrating existing legacy systems? How many hours and money will be spent on six sigma DMAIC projects rather than completely redesigning their processes? Bringing these two companies together will either be an integration of the old or a technological rebirth. Both companies have a huge headache ahead integrating their RFID item-tracking strategies.

Tom, over the years you've studied mergers how often did they just try to patch things together and try to turn a monstrosity into a functional entity?

There is still a great potential within these companies to reinvent themselves in multiple ways (not just technologically) through the merging process.

Posted by Dau at February 2, 2005 11:41 AM

Tom!

I was beginning to wonder if you really read these things! Thanks for the response. I'm honored.

~ Will

Posted by people.love.technology at February 2, 2005 11:24 PM

Having moved from a mega institution - the NHS (National Health Service) here in the UK - third largest employer in the world - to my own freelance independent world where the buck stops with me ..I have to say I am not at all surprised big companies are going to the wall.

The liberation I feel for being free is fabulous and I can now see so much inefficiency that previously I could probably also see but could do little about - apart from trying to make my little piece of the NHS the best in the United Kingdom ... sadly the organisation is too big and needs to be broken up into millions of small bits....

Wonderful to see you respond Tom - it is great to know you actually read this stuff

Posted by Trevor at February 3, 2005 6:49 AM

Tom and Hugh are going back and forth over something that transpired here months ago. Somebody said someone should post a link. Someone is me, Cathy. It was a comment Hugh put under a blog Tom wrote titled "The Single Most Important Thing," and here's the permalink:
http://www.tompeters.com/entries.php?note=006635.php

I also pulled the two slides Tom devotes to it from his master slides into a mini-PPT, and I posted that here:
http://www.tompeters.com/slides/uploaded/JPMorgan.ppt

Okay, guys?
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Posted by cathy at February 3, 2005 6:09 PM