Comments

Outrageous - to read this post - it is like I'm back @ the university! Somehow the Ichiro Mariners recently lost 12/13 to take their act out of post season possibility! Ichironomics times 3 needed in pitching ... just have to pull for the Red Sox. >:}

PS - right on about Spokane, Seattle & Washington state - love that $1.5 Billion annual state surplus - must mention 2 female USA senators & female gov. [new TPC slide?] & new Google, Yahoo & Ask.com mega presence for cheap hydro power. :>}

Posted by John at September 24, 2007 10:57 AM

John, my old Main Man, Earl Weaver of the old B'more Orioles, said pitching is 80% of the game--one year he had FOUR--cout 'em--20-game winners. (McNally, Palmer, Cuellar, Dobson. So many that only three could start in the playoffs!)

Posted by tom peters at September 24, 2007 11:04 AM

Tom
I'm about to graduate in December, and I'm starting at McKinsey (got any advice for me?) next year. I agree with your assessment--I'd like to know where Patagonia, Clif Bar, Burton, and W.L. Gore are. They should all be included amongst the best places to launch a career.

I'm serious about the advice if you're willing to share!!

Thanks.

Posted by Paul at September 24, 2007 6:02 PM

Tom,

I could not agree more. I typed in the following names into the search bar of the Harvard Business Review, and here are what I got in terms of hits:
IBM, 502 hits, General Electric, 438 hits, Dell Computer 122 hits, Wal-Mart,169 hits, and Soutwest Airlines, 73 hits. Keep in mind HBR only has about 2000 articles on its site-- even when you purge for duplicates (many articles mention more than one of the company above)--nearly 50 percent of the articles published by HBR since it began mention at least one of the "big five".
Now these are great companies-but it's kind of scary isn't it? Way too much herd behavior when it comes to what companies people focus on. The average company profiled by Jim Collins in Good to Great has revenues of $32 billion. Big companies. And yet 99.9% of all U.S. firms will never have revenues of more than $250 million in sales.

I have spent the last five years building a database of every company that ever made the Inc. 500 over a 23-year period--7500+ firms--because I wanted to see what lessons could be learned from outstanding "normal" sized firms. I merged data from numerous public and private sources and rank ordered the firms on the basis of their ability to post oustanding revenue AND profit growth over an extended period of time. I interviewed 1500 managers and executives and finally focused on the nine companies that achieved the greatest performance 1982-2004.

I spent a year studying these companies--up close in the field. They blew my mind. The experience has changed forever my understanding of America's Mittelstand economy. Much of what is held up as gospel about what it takes to build a top middle-market company is complete bunk. My book. The Breakthrough Company. will be published by Random House in January--but I'll send you a galley proof--I think you will find it another riff on one of the most important scores of modern capitalism.

Thanks for all you do.

Keith

Posted by Keith McFarland at September 24, 2007 11:31 PM

Tom

Thanks for this post - truly inspirational and rings as true as Bow Bells.

It's so easy as a graduate to be seduced into joining one of the big companies (they have the marketing budget) - and you certainly get the immediate status thing. But having run my own small firm for a year or so now, the difference in the quality of work, never mind life, is incredible. What was I thinking of before?????

Posted by Stuart Cross at September 25, 2007 2:44 AM

Is it great companies big or small or great people to work for...?

Everyone needs a shoulder, no matter how brilliant or hungry they are.

You can learn a ton even at a gas station...even at a convenience store - its all perspective and how models of knowledge are gathered, retained, and then put to kinetic purpose.

Tom, your blog alone is worth a thousand teachers...a thousand mentors...

Keep driving...the road is beautiful

Posted by PK at September 25, 2007 7:48 AM

Harvest time - it is harvest time for those new MBA's - incredible demand for such ... link below. Have my own business now - become a millionaire for the fun of it by accident - started with Hilton [Hilton Hawaiian Village] - loved the incredible new network developed. Main thing is to live below one's means so finance [obtain investor class status] is always there to proact & make the next chess move in the game of life & have fun surfing on the edge of opportunity/chaos!

Soaring demand pushes MBA salaries to record high:

Posted by John at September 25, 2007 10:00 AM

Tom,
You said it mate ... It used to be the big ate the small. Now the fast eat the slow. High end niche, high end value, highly specialised providers to the chronically unsatisfied ... AKA the PSF!

I've just spent 2 hours with a Romanian telecoms SVP ... Eastern Europeans get this big time. Watch out 'corporate' America / Britian / Germany ...

Big is not yet dead but it is dying ...

Posted by Chris Nel at September 26, 2007 5:30 AM

Tom,

Make sure you pick up a copy of No Man's Land. Doug Tatum is talking about the Mittlestand ($10-100M in sales) with a set of data I have not seen before.

Posted by Todd S. at September 26, 2007 9:41 AM

Tom,
Yes indeed. The small have the agility, vision and value to gobble up the gargantuan. I see a growing trend in women owned businesses becoming the Mittelstand of America.

Majority women-owned firms are growing at a rate nearly twice the U.S. average, contribute $1.1 trillion in revenues to the economy and create jobs for 7.2 million Americans.

PS Bougainvilleas were the reason I moved to California. Aren't you FABULOUS!, Eli Davidson

Posted by Eli Davidson at September 26, 2007 11:36 AM

It's interesting that huge companies have well defined talent development programs - it makes you wonder why they need them!?!

in a small firm you learn more, faster with less but it suites people who not only learn like that but are able to take a step back to know what they know (no program ticklist to tell them how they have progressed)

Posted by PaulH at September 26, 2007 2:30 PM

Tom's old friend Rich Karlgaard picked up on Tom's thoughts on Mittelstand and added his own at his blog, Digital Rules, today. You can read it and continue the discussion there at the link below:
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/2007/09/the-mighty-marv.html

Posted by cathy mosca at September 27, 2007 9:23 AM

Let's hear it for the ABCs

Your recent post about Germany's success and my view (utterly co-incidental) of your talk on creativity and education on YouTube have left me no peace. As an educator, I have heard enough about the deplorable state of US education (consistently around number 37 in international rankings) and the trend towards MBA bashing (most often from MBAs). Creativity is not a product of more creative classrooms; it is a product of hard work.

But first some background: I am an American living in Switzerland, teaching at the Lucerne School of Business. I hold an MA Ed, not an MBA. My rant deals with a defense of schooling, of education over training, and of support for the B and C players. Switzerland, with a population roughly the size of Virginia, can hardly be accused of creativity; is rarely known as a
team-player (refusing to join the EU and only barely joining the UN, although it holds the European HQ in Geneva), and adamantly refuses to blog (a Swiss Federal Minister who started one up a year ago was roundly ridiculed by the national media for wasting time on insignificant activities).

I point this out because: 1) Switzerland's schools consistently rank worldwide in the top 10; 2) Switzerland continually produces economic powerhouses (Nestle, Novarits, UBS); and 3) despite schooling which should be anathema to creativity, repeatedly produces creative types (Corbussier, Herzog and de Meuron, Jung, to name but a few).

Swiss teachers are very strict about socialization: kids do not leave their seats without permission; pencils must always be sharpened; and penmanship is assessed. Swiss kids start later than their American counterparts (7 years of age) and finish earlier (16 years of age). The difference may be cultural, but certainly streaming plays a role: from the 5th grade, kids are streamed into A groups (25%, college-bound); B groups (50%, commercial and trade apprenticeships), and C groups (25%, usually manual trades).

Up to the age of 16, Swiss kids receive an education; from that age on, they are trained. So I cringe when I read in the recent issue of Fast Company that Microsoft and other corporations are funding American schools. While the corporate agenda is entirely up-front, kids hardly need training in powerpoint presentations; these are products, not rhetorical skills. Swiss
B students, who mostly go on to work in small to medium-sized businesses, are thoroughly trained in essential business practices: accounting, financial math, statistics and the like. Their North American counterparts who do exchanges at our school have no chance against them (leading to much cultural misunderstanding on both sides).

Few Swiss students will end up running a social-networking site; they won't have to. They will be running businesses of their own or working for the Man, depending on their temperament. But they will be way over-qualified to work at Wal*Mart (as 1 in 7 Americans do, according to John Taylor Gatto), nor will they end up in jail (as 1 in 32 Americans do, according to the National Census Bureau.)

I suppose Switzerland realized long ago that their only natural resource was education; I also suppose that the capitalist socialism practiced in Europe is due to historical developments not prevalent in the US (according to Jeremy Rifkin); but I do see the push towards 'creativity training' in American schools and the constant bemoaning of the deplorable state of affairs as a huge step in the wrong direction. Yes, the American curriculum must be revised, but in favor of more education and stricter standards; and American schooling must become stricter, as international business is not done by noisy kids
running around classrooms solving problems to enhance their 'creativity'.

The education debate in American seems to me to be run by the same folks who argue in favor of atomic energy: they are willing to cash in on profits (the A students who go on to successful and exciting - and creative - careers, yet refuse to accept responsibility for the social costs of a Black Swan meltdown. Albert Einstein, often cited by the creativists as a perfect drop-out example, was so well-educated by the Swiss Gymnasium he attended in Basel that he took on his physics teacher (who promptly gave the upstart a barely passing grade). His creativity was a result of an extremely rigorous educational training void of any kind of group work, social scaffolding and the usual lot of pedagogical fireworks expounded by the creativists. It was Friedman who remarked that Microsoft execs were impressed by Chinese Authorities who knew science
(ie - were rigorously educated); their American counterparts are mostly lawyers.

Putting sponsored computers in the classroom will not improve the state of US education; nor will allowing Jimmy to go to the bathroom when he wants (usually a tactic born of boredom or frustration; and before the 'classes are boring' argument is used, please remove boredom and pointlessness from the workplace). Swiss B students start work at the age of 16, 3 days a
week. They are taught manners, etiquette and punctuality; on their two school days, they are drilled with business skills.

Nonetheless, they have fueled Nestle; have become number 2 worldwide in research; are amazing engineers who had to deal with nothing but mountains; are quality-obsessed; and design-oriented (Nespresso, Swatch).

Getting rich by selling pixels in SecondLife is a great way to avoid welfare, but hardly the kind of value-added cultural artefact that a country should be proud of. I turn to your blog because I know of no other place where ranting is so openly
enouraged. Thanks - I feel better now.

All the best
Douglas

Posted by Douglas at October 9, 2007 7:40 AM