New Slides

"To Hell With Well Behaved" ... Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? "Keep her," I replied. ... "The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me."
—Anna Quindlen/Newsweek

See this and more here.

There Are No Bad Projects

As the home of WOW!Projects, and loving design the way we do, we urge you all to visit Tolleson Design. Steve Tolleson, the founder of this San Francisco-based creative firm, is also the author of Soak Wash Rinse Spin. This book makes the design of Tom's Re-imagine! look downright staid. However, better than the design is the message—about what guides Tolleson's work for such clients as Nike, AOL, and Mattell's licensing program for Barbie (including the clothing line).

The Squirrel Gets the Cheese

Business storytelling expert Stephen Denning has gone down the rat hole of cheese-chasing leadership parables. Read the Economist's honest review of Squirrel Inc.

Welcome to China

Newbridge Capital is the first non-Chinese firm to gain controlling interest in a Chinese bank, Shenzhen Development Bank. Move over Citigroup, Standard Chartered, and Asian Development Bank.

Shooting The Moon(s)

The face of Phoebe, rings of Saturn, and other cool photos are here.

New CEO Earns It

Mike Neiss gave us a heads up last week that Herman Miller will be getting a new CEO July 26. Our congrats to a good friend and client. As Mike says, "Brian Walker got this job the old fashioned way—he earned it." The local paper in Michigan described him as having a "gift for leadership."

Event Slides

Tom speaks at the Better Life National Leadership Summit 2004. You can download the slides here.

Today's New Slides

Tom says this quote is fantastic:

When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me: "Finish your dinner—people in China are starving." I, by contrast, find myself wanting to say to my daughters: "Finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your job."
—Thomas Friedman/NYT/06.24.2004

See this and one other new slide here.

Hitting the Nick

After spending a week with
Bryn Meredith and his team in
Canada, Mike Neiss said he was blown away by their passion. For Bryn, it's a passion that was developed while playing professional squash in the United Kingdom. Bryn was a three-time provincial (or state) champion and, as an entrepreneur, helped organize tournaments and market the launch of the twin view four-sided glass squash court (yeah, it's cool). Three knee operations later, Bryn is now in leadership development with us, and he compares the work to "Hitting the Nick." In squash, the "nick" is where the floor joins the wall. As Bryn says, "If you hit the squash ball perfectly into the nick, the ball rolls back on the court and you win the point." The only way to get good at "Hitting the Nick" is with passion, practice, and experience. "No one is perfect," Bryn says. "But if you can hit the nick just one extra time in a game, the match can be yours!"

For anyone looking to be a better leader, does that sound familiar?

Leadership in Peoria

A reporter at WHOI asks and answers these important questions in a story about Kay Royster, a school superintendent in Peoria, Illinois:

Does Royster's role as a strong leader eclipse her need to be an open communicator? Is communication a key part of strong leadership?

The Experience Economy

Our friends at Carat Brand Experience sent us these statistics confirming that The Experience Economy is with us to stay:

The event and experience economy is currently projected at $150 billion globally.
More than 22 percent of the total marketing budget is now devoted to events.
More than 75 percent of all final purchasing decisions are made at events.
Event Marketing in North America has outpaced both advertising and promotion in growth.

Sources for this research include CEIR, TSW Research, IEG, M&C Magazine, and ANA.

Where Were the Boomers?

Tom writes in Chapter 14 of Re-imagine! that boomers have $2 trillion in annual income and marketers are "stupid" for focusing on the 18-44 demographic. So, with all respect, my question is this: How could the juvenile Dodgeball beat the adult Terminal at the box office? One article put it this way:

Dodgeball drew a young male audience, while The Terminal played mostly to older crowds less likely to rush out on opening weekend. DreamWorks, which distributed The Terminal, hopes the film has staying power.

Event Slides: Quest

Get the slides for today's event in Denver, Quest.

Shadow and Spotlight

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's famous quote "Well-behaved women rarely make history," is reflected in Anna Fels' newest book, Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives.

Ellie Mae Excels

The Business Wire plugs Tom's Re-imagine documentary with a profile of Ellie Mae ...

... a dot-com survivor that is thriving today, also exemplifies part of a growing breed of companies Peters calls the "fixers" or "enablers" that solve the problems standing in the way of business creativity and success.

Face the Music

Do you have the email blues?

Candle Under a Bushel

Innovation and Its Discontents by Jaffe and Lerner is available for advance purchase from Princeton University Press. The authors bang the pot of economics and the pan of investment banking upside the head of the U.S. patent system. The most disturbing thing they discuss, in my view, is how patently easy it has become to gain a patent, and once you hold a patent, how hard it is for others to contest it. Innovation is the playing field so far this century, which leads companies and individuals to want to hoard for competitive advantage. But it seems counterproductive for the U.S. Patent Office to strengthen the Idea Curtain. Sir Tim gets this.

The X Prize

While it will still be some time (and at least two more flights) before the private investors, inventors, and pilots behind SpaceShipOne collect their $10 million X Prize, we will all benefit from the privatization of space. Thankfully, NASA's current administrator Sean O'Keefe understands the benefits as well:

We applaud the remarkable achievement of Burt Rutan, Paul Allen and test pilot Mike Melvill following the first successful suborbital flight of SpaceShip One. Not unlike the first U.S. and Soviet space travelers in 1961, and China's first successful spaceflight this year, these private citizens are pioneers in their own right. They are doing much to open the door to a new marketplace offering the experience of weightlessness and suborbital space flight to the public.

Mojave ... we have lift-off. Now that rocks!

Navy Chocolate Boom

Put Ben & Jerry together with Penn State and the US Navy and whaddaya get? A refrigerator that uses sound waves to cool. Tres cool.

Tried & True DWYSYWD

DO WHAT YOU SAY YOU WILL DO. We talk about DWYSYWD (pronounced "dwizzy-wid") in every workshop we deliver. However, one of our new clients reminded us of a tried-and-true way to communicate the same message:

Is a pig's butt pork?
Does a bear %&$# in the woods?
Is the pope Catholic?
Are you going to do what you say you are going to do?

YES!

Player-Managers

Knowledge@Emory reviews Player Manager: The Rise of Professionals Who Manage While They Work by Philip Augar and Joy Palmer. We enjoyed reading about the six types of "players":

The Rookie—keen to succeed but struggling and charged with stepping up without doing it all

The Players' Player—whose challenge is to replicate their own success in others

The Player Mentors—who are personal and empathetic and who must develop talent without losing sight of the bigger picture

The Veterans—old hands whose challenge is to manage the institution and the team while keeping both fresh

The Play Makers—change agents who must lead the team in new directions while staying in sight

The Player Again—who returns to pure playing, unable to continue juggling the dual roles of managing and producing

Leadership and Your Peers

While digging out from ASTD, I uncovered this gem from Marshall Goldsmith's keynote:

In all cases, the most important variable in predicting the increased leadership effectiveness was the leader's interaction with co-workers.

Goldsmith's presentation was based on a recently completed research project with more than 86,000 participants at eight major corporations.

Tom's Muse on Branding

Tom's muse Julie Anixter contributed Chapter 10 on the impact of Brand Inside in Beyond Branding:

The brand, if shared, if articulated, if co-created, is a powerful flame that can illuminate the process and help everyone make principled choices.

Willing Slave or Brand You?

Author Madeleine Bunting, in Willing Slaves, examines how we are seduced by the "culture of overwork." She even credits (blames) Tom: "Peters injunctions accurately captures the strategy needed to navigate the highly skilled areas of the labour market. It is no longer enough to do a good job; you also have to do your own PR." And that's a bad thing?

Feynman, Pister, ZigBee

December 29th, 1959, Richard Feynman gave a talk entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." While the world turned their gaze to the cosmos (Sputnik had launched two years earlier), others gazed at the space within. Feynman contemplated atomic scale devices and today, Kris Pister and the team at Dust Networks are amplifying Feynman's speculations. The ZigBee Alliance is even developing communication standards for dust. Imagine ways in which smart dust could change everything.

Talent Magnets

Kristin Backhaus, in a recent Journal of Business Communication article, wrote, "As branding grows in popularity, a firm without a distinct employer brand identity is not likely to succeed in the battle for the best and brightest candidates." Or as John Sullivan, former Chief Talent Officer at Agilent Technologies might put it, "do you have a brand or a bland."

The Vision Thing

How do you inspire a shared vision? Well, easier said than done, but check out how Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino learned the "art of mobilizing others to struggle for shared aspirations."

I gave Terry Gilliam a special thank you in this movie. I met him at the Sundance workshop. I asked him a question and he said something which should be obvious but him saying it made it achievable. I said, "Mr. Gilliam, you have a vision that carries over in every single movie that you do. How do you achieve that special vision in each one of your different movies?" And he said, "I have the vision in my head and all I have to do is hire a good cinematographer, good production designer, good costume designers and my job is to articulate that vision to them. After I've articulated it, they take it and go to the moon with it."

Think of your particular business and answer these questions: Who is your good cinematographer? Good production designer? Good costume designer? Once you know, go and articulate, articulate, articulate!

Leadership by Committee

In reference to Ground Zero, the Wall Street Journal's drama critic Terry Teachout describes perfectly the kind of unwowified projects that result from committees:

The Freedom Center is one of those self-evidently silly ideas that only an underemployed committee could have conceived, a portentous-sounding Museum of Nothing in Particular destined to present blandly institutional, scrupulously noncontroversial exhibitions. No doubt the center will draw plenty of squirming grade-school kids sentenced to compulsory field trips, but I'd bet next month's rent that tourists will steer clear.

Ruthless Competition

The article about Nokia in the recent Economist magazine reminds me that our most unforgiving competitor isn't another company, but innovation itself.

Re-imagining NASA

Tom writes that: "It is the foremost task—and responsibility—of our generation to re-imagine our enterprises and institutions." Check out this cool story at CNN and Space.com detailing how NASA may re-imagine itself by turning to "privatization" and "small, entrepreneurial firms." If it means going to Mars, we say go for it!

Plenty of Room at the Bottom

Our friend Dave Dorff emailed us this fascinating speech by Physicist Richard P. Feynman with the following comment, "Here's a piece of history—may take some concentration to read (at least it did for me)—but considering it was written in 1959, it's enormously insightful for today's science and technology."

A Passion for Passion

See Tom's newest special slides presentation, Passion, the Motivational Speech.

A Hotel's Reagan Tribute

Second item on the Wall Street Journal's blog has this little item about a visit to Washington, D.C., yesterday.

What touched us most, though, was that our hotel, the Mandarin Oriental, had gone out of its way to honor Reagan. At the front desk were three monochromatic bowls of jellybeans—one each red, white, and blue. When we got to our room, the bed had been turned down, and in place of the standard chocolate were a small package of jellybeans and a card with the famous quote: "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Not only a fitting tribute, but the kind of customer service we, well, mostly read about.

Branding Q&A

Now that my business is growing bigger, should I concern myself with branding when even my logo is homemade on my computer?

When one of their readers asked about branding, Dr. Ned Roberto and Ardy Roberto answered with a little Tom.

Debating Globalization

Is 'localization' the inevitable result of globalization? As global becomes local, opposing sides of the argument are voiced by interesting folks such as Julian Birkinshaw and Helena Norberg-Hodge.

Aesthetics Management

Ashraf Oozeerally defines aesthetics management (and quotes a little Tom) in lexpress:

Ideally speaking, aesthetics management should begin with a thorough status quo, an AS-IS analysis of every aspect of a company's or brand's visual and sensory identity to project necessary aesthetic outputs (corporate expressions) while identifying how customers perceive the organization's current inputs (corporate impressions).

Brand Bounce Back

It's a fact and fiction blend, with trimmed lapels, less wool over the eyes, and a continuing love for romance and exotica. Check out what J. Peterman and John O'Hurley have done to restore the catalogue we used to read like light fiction.

Authenticity

Business 2.0 has a nice article on a "touchy-feely" B-School class at Stanford. Our favorite point: "Give away secrets. It pays to tell a newcomer some of your faults." Kinda like that good 'ol "without wax" metaphor Boyd and Ron are always talking and writing about.

Special Slides

Get Tom's latest special presentation, a shorter version of Leadership50.

WOW Project, 1639

"I then beheld a most agreeable spectacle ... a perfectly circular shape ... [where] the limbs of the Sun and Venus precisely coincided."—Jeremiah Horrocks
He entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, at age 13 as a poor scholar, taught himself astronomy, corrected Kepler's calculations (how cool is that), measured the moon's size and found its elliptical orbit, and turned in the best-to-date estimate of the earth's distance from the sun, all before dying at age 22.

Tom on Reagan

Tom wrote a bit about President Ronald Reagan in his newspaper column (which ran from 1985 to 1993). We think the following quote is fitting as a tribute:

Look, Reagan's specific economic policies in the '80s are debatable as hell. But it's not debatable—and I'm a Democrat—that Reagan uplifted our collective ... sodden spirits—and got us back to believing in our entrepreneurial, optimistic, feisty selves.

Re-imagine Small

Harold Craighead, an engineering professor at Tom's alma mater, Cornell, is working on virus-sized things. Nanoelectomechanical systems (gadgets the width of three silicon atoms) measure masses on the virus scale of 10 attograms, which is a billionth of a billionth of a gram (if my math is right). Big ideas about very tiny, very powerful things.

Quote of Note

Brits continue to weigh in on Re-imagine! From a book review in EN Magazine (The Magazine for Entrepreneurs):

Indeed, Peters is the Billy Connolly of business. If your head doesn't spin round, become engulfed in flames and blow off your neck at high speed then you may well become the most motivated person in British history.

Welcome!

Welcome to our new home page. We got tired of the old home page and, in the spirit of creative destruction, we blew it up. We've also become enamored of various blogs and blogging software, so we said, "Let's bloggify Tom." Instead of waiting around to transform the whole site, we've gone with a fast prototype here on the main page. With the help of Coudal Partners, we're using Movable Type to manage our site. Well, the home page for now. Let's see if it works. If it does, in time we'll convert the rest of our pages. It may be a bit messy for a while, but email us what you think. In time, we'll get comments turned on, so you'll be able to let us know what you think right here.

Grounded Design

It had its supporters and detractors, but it was a bold design crafted during the birth of the space age. Now, the last of the Concordes perches flightless at the National Museum of Scotland. Will we ever see a passenger aircraft with such verve again?

Tom's Newest Slides

We've been asked many times to single out Tom's latest thoughts-turned-into-PowerPoint-slides. Now they're up. See the new slides master.

RSS or No?

Ron talked about this issue a couple of days ago.

Tom in Mexico City

See the slides for Tom's event in Mexico, Expomanagement Mexico 2004.

The China Syndrome

"Signs of overheating," said IMF chief economist, Raghuram Rajan. "If the government doesn't do anything, the bubble becomes bigger," said Andy Xie, a Morgan Stanley economist in Hong Kong. What do business people in China think? A recent survey of business leaders in Hong Kong indicated that 62 percent believe the Chinese economy is in danger of overheating. This same survey reported that the biggest factor to CEO success in this hot business climate is "implementation/execution (getting it done)." It doesn't sound like "Ready, Fire, Aim." It sounds like "Fire, Fire, Fire."

We Like You, Too, David

Read what this Fast Company editor has to say about Tom. And the article that inspired David's comments, "Brand You Survival Kit," by Tom himself.

Are You Outsource-Proof?

Register for Tom's June 30 online seminar with Dan Pink, author of Free Agent Nation. Dan recently traveled to India to talk to the software programmers who are "stealing" U.S. jobs. Tom and Dan will join forces to offer a clear-eyed, hard-headed look at the most controversial business issue of our day: the offshoring of U.S. jobs to low-wage countries (Noon Eastern).

Tom's Off-shoring Manifesto

Rant No.8 of 20: "For my future grandkids' sake, I relish the idea of billions of wealthy, relatively happy Indians and Chinese—rather than the idea of billions of impoverished people pissed off at wealthy Americans." Read more ...

"Most Valuable Resource"

As Forbes and others report, Coke's new Chief Executive Neville Isdell is "assuming direct oversight over the soft drink giant's human resources department." Good news when a CEO will personally "guide development of the company's workforce."

Cool Friend: Steve Farber

Steve Farber is president of Extreme Leadership and a former member of the Tom Peters team. His new book, The Radical Leap: A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership, is a winner of Fast Company's Readers Choice Award. Read the interview here.

Ageless Marketing

An audio post on a new book we love is here. Check it out!

The Glass Cliff

Our leadership coach Michelle Rupp sent us this one from the BBC:

"Rather than women leaders causing poor company performance, poor company performance may lead to the appointment of women to positions of leadership."

According to the article, a big threat to women in leadership is the "glass cliff." In other words, "being promoted into risky, difficult jobs where the chances of failure are higher."

RSS vs. GREAT Content

viagra overnight delivery usa This may be a heck of a cheeky post from a site that has yet to offer RSS (as many of you have cyberspanked us for), but I am curious about one thing and only one thing (at least at the moment). Will RSS really provide the average consumer BETTER content or simply more CONTENT? Will the blog phenomenon have to consolidate over time in order to have truly great blogs and reach masses of people? Or will blogging remain a truly important manifestation of web democratization for a relatively small, distinct group of users who likely will be on one side of the digital divide? For those of you wanting some info about RSS, please check out Webreference and xml.

Watch Re-imagine!

Tom's new PBS documentary Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age continues to air across the country. Check local listings, especially if you live in Cincinnati/Dayton (WPTO on June 2), Milwaukee (WMVS on June 2), San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose (KRCB on June 3) and Boston (WGBH on June 13).

Re-imagine Your Business

Are you overwhelmed by all the ideas Tom presents in his book Re-imagine!? Don't know quite where to start to apply them? Well, take a look at our new tool, the Re-imagine Scorecard! Designed initially as an exercise to complete after seeing Tom live, it helps you take a critical look at your own business and prioritize what would most benefit from Re-imagination. To get further ideas about how to use the Scorecard, contact the Tom Peters Company.