Comments

At various times in my career I was told;

*I was too soft as a manager - I should be harder
*My heart ruled my head too often
*I did not have the ruthlessness needed to reach the top
*Too close to the staff I manage
*Too close to patients and their carers
*I was too easy going
*That I was idealistic
*I was too trusting of people.

I would probably agree with all those things said about me. However with time to now reflect about that list I would rather be remembered for those 8 qualities then a list of the opposite 8 qualities;

*Too hard
*Head always rules heart
*Ruthless
*Distant and removed from staff
*Distant and removed from customers
*Inflexible
*Pessimistic
*Miss trusting of people

I have never accepted one has to be ruthless and hard to be successful. Just because one is concerned about other people; fairness; integrity; and the other ‘softer’ stuff does not mean one cannot at the same time, be decisive and consistent. There is a balance to be found. I also think the qualities in the first list do not mean that you cannot be ‘tough when the going gets tough’. I will carry on being driven by the items on list one. The greatest leader I have ever met is also the most humble and ‘soft’ person I have ever met. His concern is always for people.

Posted by Trevor Gay at November 12, 2007 12:29 PM

Did you actually write this Mr Peters?

What's with all the shouting (Capital letters). You more than anyone should know that to act like this means you lost the argument before it even began.

you have a valid point however it's lost in the delivery.

Posted by mike at November 12, 2007 12:29 PM

This is why Tom Peter's rocks!

Posted by Dan Schawbel at November 12, 2007 12:38 PM

First, Trevor is a perfect example of how this isn't a gender issue at all. To stereotype and assume ALL women are good at the "soft" stuff and ALL men are good at the "hard" stuff, is crap. Simply, the type of leadership qualities that made people successful engaging the troops and getting work done 15 years ago are not the same today. People, men and women, have to learn the skills and qualities that make leaders successful TODAY, which requires a shift of mindset from the tangible (hard) to the intangible (soft) and then finding the perfect balance between the two. First and foremost a leader must be true to himself and not try to be something he is not.

Secondly, I'm going to argue that the opposite of hard is soft...the opposite of hard is easy and there is very little about running a business or managing people that is easy. Attracting, developing and retaining people in a way that gets the most out of them is hard work. Perhaps we should simply stop calling people management "soft skills" it's as difficult if not more so than balancing a P&L.

Finally, thank you, Tom, for posting your blog in all caps. It such a great feeling...when you care so much about something that you can get pissed off about it. Your passion is what inspires people. Real change occurs in the world when people get pissed off enough to do something about it. We need to be encouraging people to express themselves. It's just an opionion, everybody's got one, and we shouldn't be afraid when someone expresses theirs passionately!

Posted by Darci at November 12, 2007 1:41 PM

I agree Darci. It's not about gender at all - it is about having an open mind and the willingness to compromise. Men don't cry? - now that is crap and another whole discussion :-)

Posted by Trevor Gay at November 12, 2007 7:47 PM

Ha! Why is it that your average business person has such a hard time being human? I often wonder if the sole point of business language is to de-humanize those doing business. I struggle to find another explanation.

To the rest of the world, emotion is a normal, everyday, important part of life... and people who don't get that are generally considered jerks. Only managers don't get this.

I've found that the simplest (and most powerful) competitive advantage comes CARING. Genuinely caring about people (customers and partners) covers a multitude of other shortcomings. CARING about people is the best "marketing strategy" and the best "management method".

"Hard-nosed Business People" develop a torrent of management nonsense & double-speak to disguise the fact that they are, deep down, greedy and selfish jerks who care for money, only money, and nothing but money.

The funny thing is that in such a soulless business climate, CARING is that much more competitive-- and translates nicely to financial performance as well! It also translates to a much fuller and happier life (just my opinion ;)

Posted by AJ Hoge at November 12, 2007 8:11 PM

I don’t understand the correlation (+ive or –ive) between an MBA degree & gender. If one (M/F) believes (fallacy?) that the only way to stay ahead in the corporate rat-race is through earning an MBA (which I personally feel is not 100% true), then he/she pursues one. An MBA degree “probably” helps you see the “big-business-picture” and may not inculcate a “hands-on” approach to management, which is why you find so many management consultants (few of em’ doing terribly well) and investment bankers (a.k.a. deal-makers) armed with an MBA (its simple…”borrow the watch & tell the time”).

If one were to really get “hands-on” and “down and dirty” with business – I don’t think an MBA is required. You jus need plain “entrepreneurial” skills (in-born or acquired). However, that being said its worthwhile to consider doing an MBA if you believe in the connections (and contacts) you may develop at your B-School that could last (supposedly) a lifetime.

Posted by K.Sriram at November 12, 2007 11:35 PM

"The funny thing is that in such a soulless business climate, CARING is that much more competitive-- and translates nicely to financial performance as well! It also translates to a much fuller and happier life (just my opinion ;)"

Wish I'd said that! Nice Comment!

Posted by tom peters at November 13, 2007 1:27 AM

Tom,

Are you ranting at the WSJ, or at Lancaster University Management School (LUMS)?

I suspect that the Dean of LUMS, Professor Sue Cox, probably wouldn't have written the stuff that lit your fuse :-)

Mark

PS - Please don't apologise for ranting, your passion is something we love about you as much as your knowledge and integrity, HOWEVER lower-case letters were invented for a reason :-)

Posted by Mak Harrison at November 13, 2007 10:26 AM

I was delighted yesterday when an old friend (with a faulty memory) mis-remembered my business name as 'The Compassionate Entrepreneur' instead of 'The Commonsense Entrepreneur'

Almost made me wanna change it ;)

I have believed since day one that working with employees, partners, or clientele is just like the best version of raising kids (which, of course, includes treating them with dignity, not like, well, children.) Oddly enough, when I apply the lessons learned from 27 years of parenting, they work just fine in a business venue.

And that means way more 'soft' than hard.

Which is waaaay more hard than easy.

Posted by Joel D Canfield at November 13, 2007 12:57 PM

Yay for your outrage, because it IS outrageous. Thanks for voicing it; we business people need to do that more.

Posted by Heidi Reimer-Epp at November 13, 2007 6:39 PM

While I now lean toward the belief that an MBA is crap, getting one 25 years ago enabled me to make the transition from waitress and office temp to someone with a decent career. And it helped that I got a "hard" MBA from MIT.

That said, virtually every really hard challenge I had as a manager was related to the so-called "soft" issues, dealing with people. Creating a model, populating a spreadsheet, analyzing the market - formulaic and easy. Motivating, shaping, mentoring, resolving conflicts, etc. - difficult but oh so much more rewarding.

Posted by Maureen Rogers at November 13, 2007 8:31 PM

It’s not every day that you get a virtual roughing up on the internet by a guru like Tom Peters, so I guess all of us at Lancaster University Management School (LUMS) should be flattered. Actually we felt more flattened, but only until we realised that your rant was prompted by a misleading comment in the WSJ. Firstly, it is absolutely not true that the Lancaster MBA is “shifting from a traditional focus on technical and quantitative teaching to emphasize soft skills”. On the contrary, LUMS has for 40 years nurtured an unusually wide range of qualitative and quantitative perspectives: hard, soft, fuzzy, inter-disciplinary, call them what you will. Secondly, the Lancaster MBA design is not for a moment influenced by gender per se, nor is any part of it pandering to one gender or the other. We agree with you Tom, it’s the so-called ‘soft stuff’ that many people find really hard, especially if your admissions processes emphasise quantitative ability. In the UK MBA market—which is for more experienced candidates than the US—there’s another driver, namely that many candidates come from professions characterised by quantitative skills and convergent thinking (e.g. engineers, finance professionals). There’s a more clearly articulated piece on our website if you’re interested at www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/news/tompetersblog/ . So we’re the good guys Tom, give us a break!

Posted by Rick Crawley at November 14, 2007 4:48 PM

That is great to hear Rick - and a brilliant defence of LUMS if I may say :-)

Maybe you can sell your thinking to the other 99.9% of business schools in the UK that still focus largely on what is laughingly called the 'hard stuff?'

Maureen – you are soooooooooooo right!!! - The ‘process’ stuff of management is SO SIMPLE - it’s a walk in the park compared to the really difficult and challenging stuff of coaching people – that has always been the ‘hardest’ to do and yet most rewarding part of my entire management career.

My view has always been if you only have to be ‘hard’ to be a CEO then you are not skilled enough in the really important stuff of coaching people. That's probably why I never became a CEO - I was always happier to be judged on the supposed 'softer' stuff.

Posted by Trevor Gay at November 14, 2007 6:12 PM

Oh my.. hes' RANTING AGAIN !! (after so long !!)

this is a classic post :)-

Posted by /pd at November 14, 2007 8:32 PM

Tom at his passionate best - and that is very, VERY good!

Great rant, Tom!

Posted by Lars Olufsen at November 16, 2007 4:52 AM

Interesting topic and valuable responses. I have academic background and I can tell you a thing or two about patronisation from a completely different perspective. I have two full research degrees and one is a PhD. I'm an experienced researcher with some freelance employment in the commercial sector.

However, in trying to obtain employment in marketing/marketing research I've been told point blank:

"You've not worked in a research organisation.
You wouldn't know how to pre and post test people's opinions of a shampoo."

Pardon? How did you arrive at these claims? I wouldn't know how do this simple task even though I have the background I do?

I've found the marketing world as shut to me as the academic world used to act (20/30 years ago) towards 'outsiders'.

Do I support 'hard' and 'soft' programs? No. I don't support anything that could be construed as 'dumbing down' (which is different to just speaking plainly). If the intimation is that life experience counts then this should apply to any person.

When will our society evolve to the point where choice is more important than gender? Sounds to me like that program needs a bit of a review and PR. Then again Lancaster has a tap into various marketing people etc at the moment. I wonder whether this program has emerged from one of their collaboration projects?

Posted by Susan Plunkett at November 16, 2007 11:13 AM

Rick's post has reminded me that yes, we do often need to double check our claims or the claims we read. (And maybe to read through every single response post first!)

However, I'm left a little confused. Is "soft" referring to qualitative work in the context? My PhD was in a contemporary qual narrative field and it is NOT soft option to complete work along these lines.

Ricks suggests the words hard and soft are not used although he is applying them himself and I'm unsure (without seeing the material to which he refers) whether he is simply reflecting dialogue here OR those terms are actually a real part of the program differences but perhaps more covert. In other words, no overt discussion or usage but the undercurrent of meaning exists.

We know this happens in lots of fields and academe is certainly one.

I also didn't quite understand the point of comparison between UK professionals and US. Is it easier to obtain a professorship or associate professorship in the US than Australia or the UK? In the main yes but this isn't necessarily an outcome of a less rigorous academic program. There are socio-cultural influences on this also.

All this aside, whether a program intends to deliver a message or not, if enough people believe something to 'be' then that is enough. SO, if the whole issue of soft and hard programs is a complete furphy and misleading, then how did the misconception arise? Does Lancaster need to review it's media releases, does Tom need to read more..does..????

I must say, I've been around academe so long that the words hard and soft made sense to me once Rick mentioned qual and quant modalities. Rick, we know that the positivists et al consider many qual techniques soft option so, I remain on the fence now about what has been said here about the program. I would simply suggest your colleagues work to address long held conceptions about qualitative work.

I've had quite a battle having research companies in the commercial sector listen to views on the worth of qual techniques like ethnography and yet there ARE (boutique) companies in the US utilising the techniques. Almost nothing in Australia. I'm not sure about the UK.

Posted by Susan Plunkett at November 16, 2007 11:33 AM

Let's play devil's advocate. How many men here have used a qual technique (or employed others to) like ethnography in marketing research? I recently examined a PhD work where a mature aged student doing a management PhD did a wonderful job of offering a partially narrative based study. And he did it about a woman's experience and did it beautifully.

Posted by Susan Plunkett at November 16, 2007 11:36 AM

Hmmm...I don't think anyone believes that Hilary is "soft."

As for b-school - I dropped out of the MBA track when I realized I already knew more than the professors teaching the courses. (I was already working.) The degree can certainly help in making a career move (say, from waitress to corporate position)...but if you're already doing the job for which an MBA supposedly prepares you...well, not so much. Nobody seems to care (and never asks) about my education these days.

As for the yelling - if more of us got enraged more often - and spoke out - we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we now face - from war to civil rights.

Posted by Mary Schmidt at November 16, 2007 11:37 AM

I think Tom deliberately started us on the confusion in terms to make a point, an important one that he's been banging on about as he says for years. I rattled off my previous comment quickly in order not to miss the energy in this blog, but I see it's sprung to life again, so here's a bit more.
Susan raises some good points. I (we) agree with Tom 100%, what is often called 'soft skills' are bl**dy hard to do well, for all kinds of reasons; yet they are critical to success. In academia or business, qualitative research is no easier than quantitative, just different challenges. Didn't mean to equate them to 'soft' and 'hard'. LUMS has both men and women doing some really interesting ethnographic research in organisations and with consumers, and of course it gives different insights than quantitative methods (of which we have plenty too). And none of this is about gender; it's about playing to and developing strengths. I suspect that whether you are a business school academic trying to publish or a manager trying to succeed, you are equally constrained by the power of the positivists. Hardly any of the world's top journals accept phenomenologically based papers, and most businesses value the numbers when it comes to the crunch.
Mary, it sounds like you did a US-style MBA, even if not in the US. In the UK most MBA students have been working for a minimum of 3 and an average of 7 years,so students and professors learn from each other. When we work with Henry Mintzberg on our collaborative leadership programmes the professors are limited to 50% of the airtime to make sure there is real engagement with real management issues. And there's very little lecturing.

Here's a link to more:
www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/news/tompetersblog/

Posted by Rick Crawley at November 16, 2007 1:24 PM

Nothing like someone trotting into the room late and asking questions to fan the flame of discourse. I appreciated your points Rick. I also have found an excellent exchange of learning between Professors and students in a doctoral management program that I examine PhD theses for. There are times when I am extremely moved by the stories and revelations. Many are from post apartheid Africa and I find aspects of the content thoroughly engaging (even while critically dealing with text!) :)

Rick, there is an excellent set of criteria for contemporary (dare I say post post modern) works such as those in reflexive narrative fields and autoethnography which is the modality I did my own PhD in. Happy to provide that some time if it would be of interest. I offered it on a marketing site the other day and hoped the discussion may have led to drawing parallels. I'm a great admirer of the concept of transferability.

Also great to hear people there are being shown respect for their ethnographic knowledge and skill base and what it has to offer knowledge.

I'd welcome being involved in similar work in the commercial field myself (gratuitous plug) :)

Posted by Susan Plunkett at November 17, 2007 4:32 AM

MBA opens doors for women to senior positions that would otherwise be closed. Is an MBA all that it is cracked up to be - NO. And the reason why is that the business schools emphasis is geared more on the hard skills.

Organisations spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. But they hardly spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. We learn our greatest lessons not from successes but from mistakes.

The further you move up the ladder the greater need to have a both hard and soft skills, more so softer skills because leadership is complex. Whilst you can delegate and better apply the process-side (hard skills), you simply cannot fake leadership.

In simplistic terms the leaders behaviour is what sets them apart, its your role to create synergy and spark in the people around you. We've seen alot of the (hard skills) mistakes of late played out in the media resulting in the culling of CXO's.

Reaching the pinnacle of your career still requires you to listen. The debate about hard skills over soft and vice versa, calls out for a balance between the two and commonsense.

Posted by Julie Williams at November 20, 2007 6:35 AM

There is an old expression that says "People may never remember what you say but they will always remember how you made them feel" Emotional Intelligence is more important than hard skills. Anyone can develop hard skills but it takes real depth as a human being and life experience to develop the kind of skills that profoundly affect another human being to continue growing in a positive way as you manage them.

Posted by Suzanne Guglielmi at November 20, 2007 11:50 AM

Given the words hard and soft carry such a load of connotation, what role and service do the words about play and fulfill? Why not just talk quant and qual and allow the terms to play equitously?

Posted by Susan Plunkett at November 20, 2007 4:35 PM

Dear Tom,
Are you mad about 'soft stuff' for women, or those CDOs invented by the wizards of Wall Street, presumably of 'hard stuff' character?

Anyway thanks for the CAPS. Now go to Ground Zero, where the American WMD was unleashed to regular folks who just want a home, and do your thing.

Posted by TomK at November 20, 2007 9:06 PM

Hard or soft is irrelevant.

EFFECTIVENESS is relevant.

Lets look at communication skills. Try leading a company and executing a brilliant "hard" strategy without opening your mouth or writing a memo/email. Kind of difficult isn't it?

Like Tom Peters, I used to work at McKinsey & Company as a consultant - a place that has a culture of all you have to do is get the strategy right and you win.

The funny thing is even after we got the strategy right, something very interesting would often happen: NOTHING

Turns out until you have a CEO with vision, leadership, the ability to communicate, and manage change a great strategy doesn't really do you much good.

So on a personal note, despite my McKinsey heritage a degree from Stanford in Quantitative Economics, all of my areas of recent interest are "soft" - psychology of motivation and persuasion, linguistics, self-management, time investing, and communication skills.

My client work has led me in this direction because if you don't get these so called "soft" things right, the financial results often don't happen.

The ironic thing is my clients primarily value the "hard" stuff I provide, but I know they won't succeed without the "soft" stuff.

So I sell the "hard" stuff and sort of sneak in the "soft" stuff when they aren't paying attention.

Posted by Victor Cheng at November 22, 2007 3:30 PM

The UK’s Equal Opportunities Commission reported, in January 2002, that although since the mid-1990s, women’s representation amongst executive managers had doubled and amongst company directors it had tripled, women still comprised less than a quarter of the executive/management workforce and only one in ten company directors.

While we must undoubtedly accept that progress continues to be made, and that in the last five or so years we may be steadily approaching a female “management” cadre of the order of say 30% (in the UK at least), then why the fuss over the story “Why Women Refrain From Pursuing M.B.A.s”? Clearly, if there is any truth in the article, is it not actually, truly, wonderfully and maddeningly unsurprising that Female M.B.A. enrolment in European business schools is stuck stubbornly between 25% and 30%?

For the record my own PhD came from Lancaster and was neither quant or qual!

Posted by David Atkinson at November 24, 2007 3:00 PM

Victor, I actually think the two terms (hard/soft) do have impact however, I absolutely agree with most of what you say. I am currently working with a company conducting research on their client only blog. It's fascinating that the company has a bottom line about wanting to increase revenue but are resistant to the messages clients are expressing.

Many businesses have come to over-rely on the worth of quant data and yet their advertising is often almost entirely qualitative presented. Not necessarily surprising but few businesses have yet thought:

Why am I expecting clients to understand my qual ad message when I and my business generally don't want to listen to qual data in the lead-up to ad campaign development?

I primarily research themes across a group but I also research the "I" of experience whether it is shopping or using a cattle pour-on. Often these vignettes wind up in side columns of a brochure or similar "When I used X product I found it easier to transport and use on my own. Important to be able to work independently on the property now my sons have left the land."

Some fields really want to know about qual data. Others pay lip-service and will only consider listening if you can translate the information into numbers. I suspect part of it is security. You can easily lead a CEO to experiencing the evocation of a narrative excerpt but just as you think you've hit their sweet spot they ask for figures. There are times when I think this reasonable by the way.

Posted by Susan Plunkett at November 24, 2007 4:58 PM