Hope You Like It ...

Another major revision of my "Leadership50" PPT. I spent the entire 8-hour São Paulo flight revising. I'm quite pleased, actually. Take a look ...

Special Slides

Another new special presentation (Tom really was very busy on that plane), "Super TIB25" (TIB = This I Believe), is here. This one's short—one slide & title page—but packed with ideas.

Slides Again

Here are the slides from Tom's event in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where his topic was the Leadership50.

And we have a new addition to the Master slides choices. See Tom's Working Master—the slides deck he starts with when preparing for an appearance. He adds and removes slides to/from this basic framework until he has a custom presentation for each audience.

Finally, a special presentation was updated. Get the latest version of The Talent50 (updated 26 Sept 2005). We hope you like being kept up to date with Tom's presentations.

Latin Time! Loo Time!

Greatly enjoyed the speech last night in Campinas. But paid the price for starting at about my normal Anglo Saxon bedtime—9:45 pm. So I finished at 11 pm, chock full of adrenaline as usual; hence I didn't get to sleep 'til 2:30 am (my wake-up for flight to Belo Horizonte was 4 am).

Am genuinely peeved at our President. Ever since he passed Condi the immortal "I gotta go" note at the UN, all I can think about before a speech is if I've gone enough so I won't have to go; my last act before hitting the stage these days is a loooooong stop at the loo!

Notes From the Road

In Campinas, a suburb of São Paulo Brazil. Will speak soon. 5 pm as I write. Audio/Visual at 6:15 pm. All important. Always. Bad A/V, bad speech. Period. Crews are good, bad, indifferent (just like anything else). Crossing my fingers for good. Arriving a little early, because I have some special requests (fonts, etc); maybe tough to deal with in Portuguese. Good news: I've got a full-time interpreter for these two days. Better news: He gives me lots of space; some try to justify their fees by checking to see if things are okay ... about every five minutes, or so it feels. I NEED SPACE. ALWAYS. (Am also lonely as hell when 6K miles from home. Go figure. Life is contradictions, as someone/s wise probably said 3,000 years ago.)

Speech from 8:20 pm to 10:20 pm. Welcome to: Latin time!! (Wow, does it—the timing—feel odd.) Ah, the little matter of the speech. Planned on a "tailored generic." Then—it always happens—I boarded the first leg, Boston to Miami, flight, and I decided to do something ... Completely Different. (Or at least a bit different.) Used to do a 1-hour L50 (Leadership50) speech to much acclaim—always. (No kidding.) Haven't fixed it in two years. Spent whole BOS-MIA flight on it, and part of MIA-GRU/São Paulo as well. (Plus half of today. Damn. So much for minimum prep time.)

Finished a great spy novel, At Risk by Stella Rimington, former head (first woman head) of Britain's MI5. (FYI: James Bond was an MI6 guy.) Then I needed sleep. Most of my friends take sleeping pills; I don't; I'm so damned afraid of being groggy for a day. But this time I did try 2 Bayer PMs, or whatever they're called. Worked brilliantly. (Also in BOS bought a $14.95 neck pillow—also worked brilliantly. (Oh, the things still to learn at 62+ after 3 million miles of flying.)

Screw-up at airport re pickup. When that happens in Brazil, with a 1.5 hour ride ahead, and taxis not exactly reliable, it's a nightmare. Abbey talked me down, after I woke her up pre-dawn on a Sunday. (Thanks!!!!) And lo and behold, I found the blessed ride. My cell phone not working in GRU, which added to the pain—had to go to one of those airport phone company places where you queue up for a booth.

Hotel just fine+. (My standards are insanely high—mostly thanks to the 4Seasons.) My big three were in place: windows that open, easy DSL connection, one-hour pressing. (And hyper-clean sheets/bathroom. I guess that makes four.) Didn't need the pressing, because I stopped being so cheap, and recently bought a very good suit or two, which shake out brilliantly. (Hurray.)

As I said, today mostly devoted to presentation prep—I also turned tonight's speech into a Special Presentation, which "we" (Cathy) are posting. My breaks were walks. And more walks. Ended up doing three Power Walk segments and logging about 7 or 8 miles, pretty good for walking. Have a 112-day streak going, which is pretty good. (Going to Australia soon, and an entire day evaporates thx to International Dateline—does that count as a streak buster?) São Paulo is a little tough, security-wise, but Campinas looked pretty good to me, so I went on my Merry Way. Did notice that every hotel had barbed wire on an outer wall. Hmmm. Also hotel security was, I think, keeping a bit of an eye on me—and at one point offered me a ride. As I said, hmmm.

Hey, gotta go to that A/V check.

NB: My Mom would have been 96 today; on my mind constantly.

NB2: I know "all this" should be old hat by now, but I'm still struck by the fact that I was presenting in Dubai this time last week!

Slides, Slides, More Slides

See the post above. Preparing for his appearance in Campinas, Brazil, Tom really got into his Leadership message (he calls it "The Passion Imperative"), leading him to produce not one PPT for the event, but three, one of which is a new Leadership50—covering all the bases. Here are links for downloading: the Leadership50, Campinas, Brazil (the slides shown at the event), the longer Web version of the event slides, and Leadership50. All Bases.

Around the World in Eighty Days

You may read (hear) a little less from me in the coming days. My fall schedule, starting with the just finished Dubai/UAE stop, includes these ports of call: Dubai/UAE, Campinas/Brazil, Belo Horizonte/Brazil, Nashville TN, Moscow, Orlando, London, Berlin, Bologna/Italy, Seattle, Sydney/Australia, Taipei/Taiwan,* Birmingham/England, Durango CO, Chicago, Lagos/Nigeria, Port Harcourt/Nigeria, San Antonio, Bucharest/Romania. (*Re N5H1, my "insider" already suggests I wear a breathing mask in Taipei—a little tough to give speech in one.)

Quotes of the Day

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." —John Quincy Adams

"I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living, or get busy dying." —The Shawshank Redemption (Tim Robbins)

"Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself believe." —Winston Churchill

"[Heroine Margaret Schlegel was] not beautiful, nor supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the place of both qualities—something best described as a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life." —E.M. Forster, Howard's End (Three cheers for the "intangibles"—how about this for a hiring criterion?)

"The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B." —James Yorke, mathematician, on chaos theory in The New Scientist (I love this! Improv rules!)

"Tom, what have you done this year?" —Jessica Sutherland, IIR ME (Try answering that succinctly and persuasively—one of the best questions I've ever been asked.)

Sage Wisdom

Although she has lived 80 years, my aunt, Roslyn Alexander, is anything but old. An actress for many years, she can still be seen on stage in Chicago frequently, doing 3 shows this year alone, and appearing over the last few years at prominent theaters such as Steppenwolf and Victory Gardens. So, her comments don't come from one who is just out of step with the times ...

This evening, the conversation turned to the avalanche of emails people face every day at their jobs. She said, "Just because we can connect, should we? I hear people on their cell phones ask, 'What did you do today? Nothing? Ok, I'll call you later.' Are we just afraid that if we're alone we might have to think? If we have a bad thought, are we afraid we can't face it? Or are we afraid we'll have no thought?"

Limited Edition Tom

When Tom hit the Magic 60 a couple of years ago, he compiled 60 TIBs (TIB=This I Believe) ... one for each year of his life. Many of you have read these powerful maxims in a PDF booklet, but you ain't seen nothin' yet!

"Sixty" is a limited-edition, hardcover version that allows Tom's TIBs to leap freshly off the page—with maximum effect. It's a big book (suitable for fine coffee tables everywhere) ... full of big ideas (six decades' worth) ... with big visual appeal (after all, Design Matters! Technicolor Rules!).

It's available exclusively at the WOW!Store. (http://wowstore.tompeters.com/) Check out the sample pages and see for yourself why it's sure to be a collector's item.

Remarkabalize

As we told you last month, Tom is one of the 33 authors of The Big Moo (it'll be published on October 20 and you can pre-order a copy here). Tom has referred to Julie Anixter, another of The Big Moo authors, as his "Official Muse." She has started a network called Remarkabalize with co-author Dean DeBiase which is based on the ideas of The Big Moo and is producing the Big Moo movement. Their website launched today: www.remarkabalize.com. Cool concept: One of their offerings is the ability to customize the cover of the book with bulk purchases. Check that out here. They also tell the remarkable stories of the charities that will receive 100% of author royalties from The Big Moo here. Makes you want to get out there and start doing something remarkable, doesn't it?

Master Slides

Tom's getting ready for a busy season. So, he's doing his homework ahead, and getting his slides in order. We offer them to you here, Tom's master slides updated 20 Sept 2005: Part 1
and Part 2.

Branson

I have to admit to being a big Richard Branson fan. He's the ultimate entrepreneur who puts his money where his mouth is. For me, he epitomises the consumer champion—looking for situations where he feels the consumer is being ripped off, and trying to provide a better offering. He's taken on some big challenges, some with great success, others less so.

So the latest I read from Branson in amongst all the talk of fuel price protests in the UK last week, was a tiny snippet in the Guardian newspaper entitled JR Branson. He's only thinking of building his own refinery, to cut the cost of jet fuel and thus the price of an air ticket!!

WOW! Could he really beat the oil giants at their own game? He's done well with his airline, but is this a bite too big to chew off?

A Guru Speaks

BusinessWeek did us all the favor of putting an interview with Tom on their website following the World Business Forum on 13 September in New York. Tom talks about the "pitiful" handling of the situation in New Orleans, communication failures, the lack of female CEOs, and what it takes to be in business in these challenging times.

Here's the link. Take a look!

Cool Friend: Setty

Rajesh Setty, our new Cool Friend, is having a great run right now. He has a book out, Beyond Code: Learn to Distinguish Yourself in 9 Simple Steps, and ... Tom wrote the foreword! Raj calls that bit of luck a "dream come true." I guess so.

Also: He has a manifesto posted on ChangeThis; he's the chairman of CIGNEX; and he writes the blog Life Beyond Code. Cool.

You can read his interview here.

Shifting Values

External, uncontrollable disruptions such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina have an astounding impact on the economy. Some businesses are affected more than others, but the impact is immediate, forcing the need for a quick response and a shift in priorities. Other, less apparent disruptions, can be more damaging to the long-term health of an organization. For example, such disruptions include shifts in consumer preferences and buying behaviors, a reprioritizing of values that influence consumer and employee wants and needs. We witnessed this phenomenon as a result of 9/11. Individuals suddenly had a desire to connect with family, friends, their community; they had a need to feel engaged, to have a sense of belonging. Organizations responded to consumer preferences by focusing on creating experiences that evoke a positive emotional response ... "branding" as opposed to marketing.

What BusinessWeek reports about Microsoft—losing "key" talent, reminds us that the same value shifts that change consumer behaviors also change employee behaviors. A growing economy creates opportunity for talent. Great talent has no reason to tolerate work that is not meaningful, organizations that don't value individuals' contributions, workplaces that are so bureaucratic they make innovation nearly impossible. A culture that breeds complacency and leaders in denial can kill a company, but it's such a slow process that companies often don't feel the pain until it's too late. Microsoft is a perfect example of this.

H5N1

Presumably the designator H5N1 is already deeply imbedded in your memory. If not, it damn well should be! Today alone, the Financial Times had three articles on avian flu. I talked to someone close to the main CDC deliberations recently, and he informs me that the time has come to engage in modest panic. The odds of a pandemic, apparently, are edging up to 100% over the next couple of years. Deaths could easily be in the millions, or deca-millions, in the U.S.A. alone. Vaccine apparently simply will not cover all bets. He was talking practicalities—and suggesting that one's financial planning move into high gear. The world economy could come to a virtual (whoops, make that real) stop. Travel will be truncated. Public gatherings could be curtailed. Markets will doubtless plunge. Activities such as my speaking stuff will likely evaporate in a flash. Should we horde gold, buy concertina, and work on our epitaphs? Maybe not. But there is nothing modest about the problem, its vast implications, or the odds of it comin' on.

NB: The current (July/August 2005) issue of Foreign Affairs has a set of exceptionally thoughtful articles (here's one) on the topic, organized under the headline "The Next Pandemic?"

More MBA Woes (per Me)

While publicizing Re-imagine! in the U.K. two years ago, I did a seminar at Said Business School at Oxford. I had a terrific time, and really enjoyed my interaction with Dean Anthony Hopwood. He's leaving, and I just read that they've chosen a replacement. I'm sure designee Colin Mayer is a fine and brilliant and hyper-qualified fellow. But, damn it, he's a frigging finance guy. Why in the hell can't biz schools give us a dollop of deans with specialties in Innovation or Sales (or even Marketing) or Design or Organizational Transformation or Leadership*? (*Why is it that many of us agree that inspired "leadership" is of paramount importance to enterprise, but only three "universities" specialize in it—Annapolis, West Point, Colorado Springs? The "real" B-schools "cover it" by the likes of sending first-year students on a 3-day "ropes course" before the "real classes" ... on FINANCE ... commence.) Gawd, how I hate B-schools (just in case you were wondering or had forgotten).

Ya Gotta Hightail It to Dubai!

The UAE economy is pegged to grow by 20% this year. Dubai has got more amazing-monster construction projects going on than I've ever seen (Shanghai probably has more, but over an extended area). Mega-events (the just-concluded Dubai Shopping Festival drew attendance of 3.3 million) and mega-centers like "Sports City" are popping up like weeds. ("Weeds" concocted by platoons of the planet's best architects! Most of it is truly mind-boggling—a word carefully chosen.) Most everything planned seems to aim to be the "world's best-biggest." Soon the "biggest shopping center" will open"—apparently it makes Mall of America look like a Mom & Pop. The "World's Tallest Building" is on the way. And today's Gulf News even reported that a big new Mosque will feature the "world's largest carpet"! The energy is palpable. The spirits are sky high! The stock market is soaring! Foreign investment is increasing at a staggering rate! And I love it, despite the fact that the government is still well short of being truly liberalized. I'm leaving for home at 2am, but I'll be coming back in a couple of months—I seem to routinely have two or three conferences a year in the UAE. And, my heavens, are the people ever welcoming! (There were 20 Karachi bankers who flew over to my conference to see me yesterday—the first ever Middle East HR Conference, see slides below—and they were almost ready to drag me on the spot to Pakistan to do my speaking rounds. Most all offered to put me up in their homes.) Much is amiss in the Middle East, for sure, but there's also a bucket of good news. My long-term bets are always on economic liberalization! In the words of Deng Xiaoping in the late '70s, "to be rich is glorious"—and one helluva lot less politically & ideologically volatile than the alternative.

Connections

Darci Riesenhuber of Tom Peters Company submitted this blog entry.

I just attended a WIT (Women in Technology) event where my friend, David Nour (www.nourgroup.com) spoke about his trademark concept, Relationship Economics. He told a story about introducing two colleagues to each other. One, a lawyer who'd been with a large firm for five years, had never met his colleague who'd worked at the same firm for nearly 10 years, until David introduced them to each other! (Obviously a very large firm.) But, think about it ... how much knowledge is wasted, talent goes unrecognized, best practices aren't shared in an environment where colleagues don't spend enough time out of their 5'x5' spaces to connect with their own peers. Then suddenly I'm struck by the irony ... I'm at an event whose target audience is people in the technology sector ... listening to how communication between individuals is broken. People don't know how to establish, nurture, and leverage relationships. So, I ask you ... with so much "connectivity" how can we not be connected?

Slides: Dubai and Talent

Tom's speaking to HR folks in Dubai at The Middle East HR Summit, 18 Sept 2005. He's long called HR the "Rock Stars of the Age of Talent," so he was inspired to re-write a Special Presentation from awhile back, The Talent50. And, of course, we make these slides sets available to you:
Dubai here and Talent50 here.

And another Dubai event: Master Foods, here.

M Squared

Ed Cotton, over at Influx Insights (one of our favorite blogs), just gave us the low down on an upcoming conference about the future of marketing called M Squared. It's September 27th at the Presidio in San Francisco. Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs and one of our Cool Friends, will be speaking. And so will Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine (yes, he's the one who started the buzz about The Long Tail). That's enough to convince me to want to go. If you need more, check out the rest of the line up here.

Kudos

I am not one of W's greatest fans. But I thought the speech last night was good, bordering on excellent. Delivery was the best I've seen—not a sign of "the smirk," among other things. Content was bold and "surprising" (not consistent with some Bush themes of old). As many said, the proof is in the pudding.* (*What the hell does that mean?) But you can only do so much in one speech. The "proof" for me was that I felt better as an American after the speech—that we are at least going to try to step up to the plate in a way that is consistent with our beliefs, our optimism, our might, and the enormity of the opportunity to offer a showcase to all of our citizens and indeed the world. I especially liked the fact that the Pres says he dearly hopes the evacuees come back HOME!

(I buy the content almost word for word—but how the hell do we pay for our bold initiatives in the Gulf states while already saddled with record deficits and the Iraqi quagmire still stretching before us?)

To Be Deleted

Some of our readers have been using our site as a self-publishing vehicle. That's what you establish your own website for. If you want people here to see your lengthy article, please put a link into the comment, not the whole article. We're deleting past posts such as I am describing, and we'll delete future posts without any further notification.

We realize that an attempt to put too many links into a comment results in a situation where we have to approve your comment before it goes live, so that may be why some of you have resorted to dropping whole articles into the discussion. But the lengthy articles bog down the discussion. Comments should be (at least marginally—we love the digressions, too!) related to the topic of the post, brief, and succinct. Please publish monographs elsewhere. If you provide links, others here have the opportunity to check out your work, at their choice.

Has Management Theory (Me?!) Let Us Down?

Yes. And no.

I've been in a funk, beyond immediate concerns over human suffering, about New Orleans: (1) I "do" management, and have so done for 40 years. (2) New Orleans was a failure of down-and-dirty management as much or more than a failure of sublime leadership. If systems and processes had worked as we imagined or hoped they might, it wouldn't have mattered whether Mr Bush, for instance, was in Crawford or Timbuktu. Wal*Mart did its part—and none of us except Mrs Scott has a clue as to where her husband Lee, Wal*Mart CEO, was at the time, right?

So, why hasn't the work of Drucker, Peters, the Harvard Business School, et al. averted the likes of the N.O. nightmare?

This is not an apologia, or at least I hope not, but here is one abiding reason, I believe, for the problem—and it is in the end unfixable.

As usual in enterprise, public or private, much of the issue boils down to the eternal struggle between centralization and decentralization. Centralize, and aspects of coordination increase. (The King or Mussolini, who after all did make the Italian trains run on time, can chop off the heads of those who don't deliver). But the price is innovation and initiative—or, in the case of government, democracy itself. Our premier student of government, the conservative professor James Q. Wilson, in his magisterial book, Bureaucracy, tells us bluntly that government is intentionally not designed to work ... as in work "efficiently." The genius of the Constitution, and its so far successful 228-year run, is that the forces of contention that preserve Democracy (among other things, the tensions between local + state + federal gov'ts that flummoxed New Orleans) do not entirely keep us from muddling through on the efficiency/trains-run-on-time side of the equation.

What we're seeing in the wake of New Orleans is what we see in the wake of all disasters: calls for "strong" coordination through centralization. Immediately after 9/11 we jerry-rigged the Department of Homeland Security to "coordinate our response to terrorism" (the diminishment of FEMA by DHS, ironically, contributed to Federal failures in N.O.). The 9/11 Commission answered intelligence failures by calling for (and getting) centralization of intelligence affairs. Will DHS or the new intelligence structure help avert future crises? The jury is out (and that's understatement).

Interestingly, and with very high long-term stakes, the private sector is going through the same sort of examination/re-examination. Hammered by the Japanese in the '80s, industry went on a process-improvement binge. The goal: become as efficient as the (centralized/trains-run-on time) Japanese. Then along came China (more "efficient"—low cost—than anyone could have imagined), and industry is now agog over "fighting back" via innovation, which is an unabashed byproduct of decentralization. Nowhere is this more evident than at GE. CEO Jeff Immelt is attempting mightily to restore GE's historical emphasis on risk-taking and big-bet innovation, after years of Jack Welch's (successful) cries for operational efficiencies.

In enterprise, and indeed government, the truth is that there is no truth. Human institutions of all shapes and sizes need high doses of freedom and imagination, as well as discipline and efficiency. Hence there is—and will be and should be—perpetual warfare between centralizers and decentralizers. And usually it's "worked out" by alternating periods of over-correction in one direction and then the other (from cowboy capitalism on Wall Street in the '90s to Sarbanes-Oxley in the '00s, etc).

New Orleans notwithstanding, I've always stood "left of center;" that is, in favor of leaning toward decentralization. My reasoning in the main is quite simple: It's always easier to restrict freedom than to reclaim it after restriction. I admit this central tenet may need a bit of rethinking in the age of terrorism; the downside of helter-skelter preparation for or response to a big terrorist event may require leaning toward centralization. But then that thought is upstaged by an immediate "whoops": Do we really think we're safer because the Department of Homeland Security has merged/"centralized" several dozen massive bureaucracies?

Processes can and must be improved, no doubt. But in the end the centralization-decentralization issue is not resolvable, and never will be. Wal*Mart responded well in N.O., and deserves our unstinting praise. But do we really, in the end, want government (or all of industry, for that matter) to be like Wal*Mart?

*******

FYI: This battle rages on at every level. Headline in today's Wall Street Journal: "As Gulf Prepares to Rebuild, Tensions Mount Over Control: With Federal Dollars on Way, Washington Ponders Czar and Locals Seek Autonomy." (NB: For me, at least, the thought of Michael Chertoff—or Jack Welch or Rudy Giuliani or Donald Trump or Martha Stewart—as central planner for economic revival of the Gulf Coast chills the heart!) Take two: Shouldn't we all be nervous whenever we hear, even in jest, the word "czar" being bandied about? My "Tom's Dictionary" definition of CZAR: sounds comforting, never works, causes untold suffering—and the closer it comes to "working," the more the suffering. You'll never find "Elect Joe Stalin" bumper stickers on my car!

Hmmm: Back to my starting point. I guess visible leadership does matter. If the balance of centralization and decentralization is destined to be forever in flux, we will by definition never "get it right." Thence we will always be "reduced" to muddling through. If that's the fact, then we do indeed need that "strong leader"—at times of crisis—to momentarily bring the perception of order to messy human affairs, in order to get folks marching in the same direction. No "system" could—or should!—do that.

FYI redux: BusinessWeek's 19 September cover story, "The Next Big One," is the best piece I've read on what—pragmatically—needs to be done to deal with our increasingly unstable world. Speaking of chilling, their piece-within-a-piece on the consequences of an avian flu epidemic is, well, chilling.

Stuffed!

Seems that our poll (see left-hand column) about federal responsiveness to Hurricane Katrina has attracted two people at the extremes, one voting hundreds of times for "inspires confidence," the other voting almost as much for "embarrassing." Given this kind of ballot stuffing (and we know it's most likely two individuals since it all happened in a very short time span), the poll is now meaningless, so we'll be taking it down. We'll have a new poll up in the not-too-distant future. And maybe we'll figure out some way to limit everyone to one vote. You know, when they said "Vote early, vote often," they weren't talking about tp.com.

José!

I've been working with HSM for almost 20 years, and I was so blown away with their Latin American events in the 80s that I begged their co-founder, José Salibi Neto, to "bring the show to the U.S.A." HSM finally did, last year, with a bang at Radio City.

Years ago, José came to the U.S. from São Paulo on a tennis scholarship to the U. of South Carolina; he became a world-ranked player ... and I'm sure the timing of yesterday's event was influenced by José's determination to see the US Open finals! (NB: José, who was also a long-time TV tennis commentator in Brazil, says Federer is the best he's ever seen.)

More: Manhattan was a real zoo—the Open winding down, the U.N.'s madcap week, a monster Clinton conference, "fashion week," etc. The Thai Prime Minister was one of several heads of state (all with enormous entourages) at my hotel; and of course a ton of Secret Service. Returned from a long Central Park power walk—soaked and literally dripping with sweat—and found myself in the elevator side-by-side with Thailand's Deputy Prime Minister and some very large, scary people. (The Deputy PM was very cordial, understanding, and somewhat bemused by a jogging 62-year-old. As to whether or not the "entourage" were as amused by the dripping sweat is perhaps another story ... )

All in all, quite a deal. After all this, I arrived at Keystone at 3:45am EDT this morning ... to speak about five hours later. Summary comment: All in a day's work.

Tom's Amazing Days

Tom is speaking today in Keystone, CO (el 9,300 feet), at the annual event hosted by the Experience Economy gurus Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore; it's called "thinkAbout," and Tom reports it's quite a performance. He's still on a high (see above) from his first ever "on stage" performance yesterday at Radio City Music Hall ... in front of 4,000 folks attending World Business Forum 2005, produced by the "amazing" Brazil-based HSM.

Tom's other Radio City "high highlight," he tells us, was meeting Craig Venter for the first time; Venter, who "did" the human genome, was speaking after Tom.

You can get the slides from thinkAbout here, and the slides from World Business Forum here.

Event Slides: HSM

Tom joins Rudy Giuliani, Jack Welch, Richard Branson, Colin Powell, Andrea Jung, and others at the HSM World Business Forum 2005 in New York. It must be quite an event! You can download the slides here, or get a longer, web-only version here.

Master Slides Update

The Re-imagine! Master, the PowerPoint slides collection that Tom draws from whenever he prepares to speak, is available for downloading from our website. The collection is so large that we separate it into two parts, which you can download here (Part 1), and here (Part 2).

There are also a typical one-day presentation here, and the newest slides here.

Bentonville Kudos!

Wal*Mart bashing has become a popular sport. Whether deserved or not, check out today's Investor's Business Daily. The lead story: "Wal*Mart Is Lauded For Fast Relief Aid To Katrina Victims." Though 89 of Wal*Mart's 126 facilities in the area were damaged, communications networks remained intact, and the giant's amazing distribution was able to get exactly the right supplies to exactly the right places—in most cases long before any government support arrived. As of the week's end, Wal*Mart had shipped and delivered $20 million of donated goods to the affected Gulf areas.

Design, and Other, Blogs

There's a new entry on our blogroll. Take a look at design*sponge. The entry that hooked Tom was this. If you count the bespoke tailoring blog (English Cut) as a design blog, then we now have two.

This reminds me that there are many blogs we barely explore because business is our focus at tompeters.com. For instance, in researching the ChangeThis post I did on Friday, I found a poetry blog. Crystal King wrote a management manifesto for ChangeThis, but she also writes poetry.crystallyn.com. I'm adding that to our blogroll, too, because, yes, we think poetry has its place on a business blog.

Journos' Tour of Duty

Whatever fights journos (journalists) and bloggers may have had in the past about their roles and how they cover events, reading the bloggish coverage of the Hurricane Katrina's aftermath by mainstream media pros like NBC's Brian Williams is riveting. Don't miss it.

An interesting dynamic is taking shape in this city, not altogether positive: after days of rampant lawlessness (making for what I think most would agree was an impossible job for the New Orleans Police Department during those first few crucial days of rising water, pitch-black nights and looting of stores) the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement. In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won't be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

The tour of duty these journalists are going through in New Orleans and Mississippi may prove to be another turning point for MSM, and change forever how they view and report the activities of this government.

female viagra canadian Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link.

Tom at ChangeThis

Tom has a new manifesto at ChangeThis.com—"The 'PSF' Is Everything," which you can read about and download here. While you're at it, take a moment at the ChangeThis home page to sign up for their newsletter. You'll get a notice every two weeks of new content at the site. This week's newsletter includes a lot of great stuff:

"The Hypomanic American," by John Gartner, author of The Hypomanic Edge.

"25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself," by Rajesh Setty, soon to be one of our Cool Friends.

"Critical Thinking for Managers," by Crystal King, a Senior Product Marketing Manager at AvantGo, a service of iAnywhere.

"The Personal MBA," by Josh Kaufman, whose blog is called Inside My Bald Head.

I Love This!

In the discussion under a recent post, a commenter named Scott Peterson pointed me to The Free Dictionary.com. Jason Peterson later let me know to be sure to include "the" in the URL. Thanks, guys. As a result, I visited for the first time this wonderful website, www.thefreedictionary.com. Check it out!

There's a great feature called Match Up, where you match five words with their synonyms, and then you find out how well you did. My first try I got five out of five. Oh, maybe that has something to do with why I love the website so much.

Government: Yes!

Government at all levels has been under attack in recent days—and I think deservedly so. On the other hand, Government can work!

To be sure the issue doesn't have the weight of New Orleans, but this morning I applied for and received a new Vermont driver's license; I've been a full-time resident for a while, but had not bothered to cancel my California license.

The Rutland VT office of the DMV opens at 7:45A.M. I arrived only slightly early, at 7:35A.M. Here it comes: I was done (vision tested, computer-checked for possible past transgressions from around the country, photographed, license with holographed picture issued) in ... TWELVE MINUTES. The office opened PROMPTLY at 7:45A.M. ... and I was outta there at 7:57A.M. (Incidentally, the rapid process was abetted by the downloaded forms that I filled out last night.)

Sure, VT is a small state. Nonetheless, by any standard, that was one helluva performance! Hats off to Government that Can & Does Work!

Government: No!

I was in the U.S. Navy for 4 years (1966-1970). I enjoyed most every minute of it—and I remain a hopelessly loyal Navy "alum." Nonetheless, I was outraged by a story I read in the New York Times yesterday. Two Navy helicopters were delivering supplies to New Orleans. On the way back to Pensacola they received a human distress call. They were out of radio contact with their base, and proceeded to the trouble spot—no other choppers were at hand. Their subsequent acts were heroic and Herculean to an extreme. They made difficult landings, went through collapsing buildings to extract two trapped blind people (a/k/a U.S. citizens!); all in all they rescued 110 stranded folks. Expecting, if not a hero's welcome, at least an attaboy upon returning home—they were excoriated instead. Commander Michael Holdner, the base air ops chief, chewed them out for not promptly returning to get more supplies. As to their inexcusable rescue of humans, Holdner said, "We all want to be the guys who rescue people." Huh? Or: Duh! Or: What the %#&*? For his trouble, one of the pilots, Lieutenant Matt Udkow, was relieved of flying duty and assigned to oversee a temporary kennel (you read it right ... KENNEL ... Bow-wow, etc.) in Pensacola.

My urgent recommendation to the Chief of Naval Operations: Immediately remove Commander Holdner from the command of human beings and re-assign him to LT Udkow's kennel—as an inmate.

(NB: Of course I understand that the pilots possibly violated standard procedure—and used, Oh My God, "initiative." My take, tested in Vietnam oh so many years ago, is that innovative marginal disobedience in service to the cause is to be welcomed in 9.9 cases out of 10; okay, I'll even countenance Holdner chewing out the pilots privately—but a kennel re-assignment? What was the idiot—stronger words come to mind—thinking? I'm delighted to see that he has caused a mini-firestorm, and pray it will effectively end his career. Maybe he can start a second career in an animal shelter. Nah, forget it; I'm too fond of animals.)

Nice!

No surprise, the passing of loved ones is on my mind. Thence I was both tickled and admiring of an obituary Susan chanced upon in the Vineyard Gazette (Martha's Vineyard, 09.02). The deceased was Stanley Murray, and the guidance to mourners was as follows: "In lieu of flowers, please buy some coffee for the person behind you in line at Dippin' Donuts or Espresso Love and tell them it's from Stan."

Nice!

(As I guess is apparent, Dippin' Donuts and Espresso Love are many Vineyarders' favorite morning coffee hangouts—including yours truly when I'm "on island.")

(Also, I suppose this dovetails nicely with my recent Post on MBWA. Intimate human touches are the glue that holds communities together—and enterprises, too.)

MBWA Redux

With Noel Guinane's permission, we've moved his Comment up to become a Post; note in particular the quote from Fred Schwed:

I love the idea of Management By Walking Around. Shame in a way that it was taken as a revelation since I really don't know any other way of running a business. Nothing I can think of in business is more boring than sitting behind a desk dealing with masses of reports (unless it's having to sit through endless PowerPoint presentations).

Tying the subject of MBWA to Wall Street, our engine of commerce, here's something Fred Schwed Jr. said:

"... your true speculator starts near the corner of Wall and Broad and doesn't wander farther away than the next two tickers. He knows that in some savage unvisited spot like Jersey City a corporation is actually in business, but he doesn't really think that important. What fascinates him is that against this vague concept of a living business certain pieces of engraved paper can be issued, and that with these pieces of paper thrilling games can be played.

"He does not easily conceive the business in terms of workers, management, products, processes, markets, and patents. Much more simply he thinks of the Norfolk and Western Railroad as NFK, and the United States Steel Corporation as X. What is most clearly in his mind is that if he wants to make a play a fellow can always find a close market in X but not in NFK."

You might not think a connection can be drawn between Wall Street speculators and corporate managers, but I have seen the same tendency in both to view a business as an abstract collection of assets and liabilities that can be moved around like pieces on a chess board. The speculator might have an excuse—his interest is making a quick kill, but the corporate manager has been hired to manage the business.

I think the reason MBWA hasn't caught on as much as it should is because it's viewed as too much work to get off your backside and learn about what's really going on in the business. There's a certain appeal to playing mental gymnastics with your pals. I call it Theoretical Management. It's management by theory, not practice. You see it everywhere—managers telling us what could be and should be, but unfortunately isn't.

Cultural Icons

With the tragedy of New Orleans and a still-blooming insurgency in Iraq, do we really need Donald Trump and Martha Stewart as our primary cultural icons?

I believe we are indeed at war (four years next week), and as many have said, the shared sacrifices, save the spike in gas prices and $1 "support our troops" bumper stickers, are about zero.

MBWA After All These Years

I was cleaning out some of my Mom's stuff, and came across a picture of me wearing a red (what else?) hat with, in big/bold letters ... MBWA. It did more than "bring back memories."

In 1980, while doing some generic "excellence" research that later became In Search of Excellence, Bob Waterman and I interviewed then HP president John Young. (HP was a $1B company at the time, with marginal interest in computers). John explained that HP's hallmark "MBWA" was "more important than ever as we experience explosive growth." Well, Bob & I had no idea what "MBWA" was—though we'd both had a belly-full of strained acronyms.

MBWA ... Managing By Wandering Around ... quickly became our favorite "excellence" idea! Technically, it meant staying in direct touch (damn the bureaucracy!) with the folks who do the work. Metaphorically, it stood for all/much of what was wrong with American management—McKinsey & Harvard Business School-style—as we confronted the Japanese challenge in areas such as product quality. That is, "big business" had become an abstraction. It was a "by the numbers" affair, where front-line "personnel" were pretty much interchangeable parts in a well-oiled "machine" and where "strategy" was considered far more important than primitive ideas such as quality and service and turned-on folks. Of course by then the bearings had lost most of their oil and seized up!

Now, it's 25 years later ... and, frankly, not as much has changed as we had hoped. To this day! A lot of the problem in New Orleans was the absence of MBWA. The fool (perhaps too kind a description) who heads FEMA gave new meaning to "out of touch." But that's only part of my rant here. More generally I hope to quash terms swiped from the military such as "on the ground" (not all bad—though it gives me the impression of leaders playing at soldier) and resurrect Managing By Wandering Around.

Leaders, from FEMA and the White House to GM (!) and Wal*Mart will only thrive, even in the age of the Internet and "virtual organizations," if they somehow stay in touch. (In fact, one of Wal*Mart's secrets of continued excellent performance—with 1.5 million people on the payroll—is an uncanny ability to stay in touch with the front line.)

Bottom line: I think I'll dust off my quarter-century old MBWA hat—and maybe I'll send it to the President!

One More Time ...

Several of you have told me that GM is "so yesterday" that I should stop trashing them—as in ... Who cares?

Well they're still damn big, and still employ a lot of us. So I pose this question: Who's more incompetent, FEMA's chief or GM's? As I see it ... Whatta contest!

As I (clearly) recall, GM boss Rick ("I know things you don't") Wagoner said ... I KNOW THINGS YOU DON'T. Namely that buyers didn't give a shit about gas prices ... and would keep on buyin' his high-margin SUVs.

Of course RW couldn't have predicted New Orleans, but it seems as though the Japanese did!

Last week GM announced August car sales were down a whopping 13% (industry sales were up 3.8%) ... even as they continued their "free cars" employee discount. Ford's biggest SUV sales plunged ... 40%! And, oh yeah, Japanese car market share hit a new record, 39%. (Nissan ... +15%. Toyota ... +14%. Honda ... +23%.) So what, exactly, is it/was it that Wagoner knew that you and I didn't?

Re-imagining Disaster Relief

John O'Leary, long-time Tom Peters Company associate, submitted this blog post. viagra order

What has transpired in New Orleans is a national tragedy. The public's response to the government's response has been one of outrage. Understandably. Who's to blame? is, of course, the question of the week. But is it the most valuable question in the long run—one that will yield answers that lead to innovative solutions and substantive change that can prevent such devastation in the future? (I'm not denying that local and national leaders need to be held accountable. I'm more concerned with what happens AFTER the plank-walking and head-rolling.) Here are a couple of alternative questions. "How do we create the right forum (and I don't mean a congressional investigation) to re-imagine disaster prevention, preparedness, and relief?" "What private-public partnerships/alliances can be created that don't depend so heavily on federal assistance?"

What questions would YOU offer? Suggestion: a question that gives you a sense of smug superiority or self-righteous satisfaction is probably NOT the most useful one if it perpetuates the blame spiral that handicaps creative thinking and collective action.

Complexities

We've been doing this blog for a year now, and we always think the standard features, like our poll, should be easy for the people who implement them for us. Especially in late 2005. But no, it seems we just don't realize the complexity of what they've built for us.

You might have noticed, if you voted earlier today, that the results that showed up didn't match the poll you voted on. Our apologies if that happened to you. It's fixed now.

Questioning the Value of "Vast"

Frankly, I haven't been a fan of the Harvard Business Review for years—and it doesn't seem to have crippled my ability to keep up with biz thinking. But the other day in Reagan National airport I picked up the September issue, because one article caught my eye: "All Strategy Is Local." It is brilliant and counterintuitive—and it reinforces my longstanding bias that beyond a certain point Big ceases to be beautiful. Markets from retail to media to pharmaceuticals are examined, and the results are startling. Even ubiquitous Wal*Mart's assumed scale/efficiency advantages are questioned! Here are some selected quotes:

"All Strategy Is Local: True competitive advantages are harder to find and maintain than people realize. The odds are best in tightly drawn markets, not big, sprawling ones"—Title/Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/HBR09.05

"Sustainable domination is more likely in markets of restricted size. It is paradoxical but true that economies of scale are subject to scale limitations themselves. ... When a market gets too big, diseconomies of coordination can prevail over economies of scale."
—Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/"All Strategy Is Local"/HBR09.05

"Some observers have argued that Wal*Mart owes its superior returns to its enormous size and, as a consequence, its purchasing power. [But] if the purchasing power that comes with size were responsible for the company's success, then Wal*Mart's profitability should have increased as the company grew. Yet its operating margins have not increased since hitting their high watermark in the mid-1980s. ... As Wal*Mart has grown, its profit margins have suffered in comparison with those of more geographically concentrated competitors, such as Target. ... Sam's Club appears to be no more profitable than Costco and BJ's Wholesale Club. The fact that Sam's Club is the least geographically concentrated of the three competitors appears to have offset any advantages derived from Wal*Mart's efficiency. ... Wal*Mart's experience overseas tends to confirm the limited impact of the retailer's operating advantage. Overseas returns are less than half its domestic margins."—Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/"All Strategy Is Local"/HBR09.05

"In media, broadly defined, actual experience has been even more strikingly at odds with prevailing strategic wisdom, which has proclaimed that successful media companies would be those that integrate content and distribution, are global in reach and embrace and master new technologies. ... None of the leading media companies [Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, News Corp] has equaled the performance of the S&P 500 over the last 15 years." (Also way below traditional newspaper companies.)—Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/"All Strategy Is Local"/HBR09.05

"For all their talk of the global convergence of consumer demand, separate local environments are still characterized, in both obvious and subtle ways, by different tastes, different government rules, different business practices and different cultural norms. ... The more local a company's strategies are, the better the execution tends to be. Localism promotes decentralization—and since the days of Alfred Sloan, decentralized management has consistently served as a superior structure for concentrating management attention."—Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/"All Strategy Is Local"/HBR09.05

Leadership?

Partisan politics aside, this has not exactly been W's finest hour. As my (very Democrat) wife said, "Where's Rudy?"

Watched an interview with Homeland Security's Michael Chertoff; his "We have no info on the Convention Center" while viewers simultaneously watched chaos from the Convention Center was pathetic. My equivalent to Susan's "Where's Rudy?" was almost, "Where's Bernie Kerik when we need him?"

As a Vermonter observing the Feds' response in N.O. and imagining a WMD event, I'm thinking of going out and buying guns, ammo, barbed wire, and a truckload of canned food and water—if I can afford the gas to get to market.

Fact is, the Feds can only do so much physically. But the top of the Pyramid surely has the opportunity to provide visible, steely determination in the Churchill-Giuliani mold. That's the damn point of leadership. (For starters, can Mr Bush's speech writer who concocted the first set of remarks upon W's return to the White House.) (Hint: A tightly scripted photo-op trip will likely come across as phoney baloney of the first order. How about a "Southern White House" for the next several days in the N.O. vicinity?) (By the by: Three throaty cheers for Texas! This morning brought news that more thousands of refugees will be welcomed to Dallas & San Antonio.)

Let's Reposition!

I found it very hard to be a Sprint customer—it's why I left. You can't complete many calls. The people in the stores often can't help you, because they are bound by rules, and there are so few of them that you can't get service without waiting for a long time. You can't get served on the phone very well either, because of long waits and a labyrinth to find customer service.

Ad Age Daily reports today that Sprint, after acquiring Nextel, is going to "relaunch and reposition itself as a sports entertainment company as well as a telecommunications giant." The company's new tagline will be "Yes You Can," blasted out to the world in an estimated $500 million ad campaign.

They inherited Nextel's NASCAR sponsorship, and added sponsorships with the NFL, the US Ski and Sports Association and the NHL. Oh, and of course, they have a new logo. The Sprint stores (the places I could never get good service or a "Yes, you can" answer) are being "rebranded," which probably means a superficial facelift and no change to the customer experience.

My prediction: Sprint will still suck. You can't buy great marketing, no matter how big you are. You have to do great marketing. You can't say "Yes, you can" if your employees and customers think "No, we can't." Marketing can't be a big game of fakeout, no matter how big your checkbook is.