Goodbye, Coach

Sadly, one of Tom's inspirations died yesterday. Bill Walsh was the legendary coach who led the San Francisco 49ers to Super Bowl wins for the 1981, 1984, and 1988 seasons. He also coached at Stanford, and part of his tenure coincided with Tom's studies. Read this blog by Rich Karlgaard, who knew both Bill Walsh and Tom during those days. We add our goodbye to his.

PrimeTime Women

Our Cool Friend Marti Barletta spoke with Hoag Levins over at Ad Age the other day about PrimeTime Women, the 50- to 70-year-old women who have ALL the money and are ignored by most marketers. Marti gives a shout out to Tom about 6 minutes into this 8 and a half minute video by noting that Tom has been talking about the women's market "for 15 years." (So, it's really been 11 years, but that's close enough.)

You can watch the video here.

There's Still Time to Sign Up

Are you located near Denver? The scheduled Brand You workshop is to be held there on August 1st, so the time to sign up is now. As we said in an announcement a couple of weeks ago, the war for talent is more competitive than ever. Thus, personal branding is becoming increasingly essential. Explore the possibilities of enhancing Brand You to the advantage of yourself and your employer in a customized, one-day session to be presented by Tom Peters Company in partnership with Arapahoe Community College.

Repeat: Brand You workshop, Denver, CO,
August 1. For more information click here, or for registration, click here. There are only a few openings left, so hurry! And for those of you who can't make it to Denver, there'll be another session in Dallas in early October.

A Company Gets It

We know that the women's market is booming and that many haven't taken full advantage of this market. Not so Harley-Davidson. They've noticed that there is a huge market of women who are buying motorcycles—about 100,00 a year. As stated in the New York Times today, "'Fifty percent of the population is female and there is pent-up demand,' said James L. Ziemer, Harley-Davidson's chief executive. 'We need to remove barriers.'"

Companies that remove the barriers and recognize the power of women buyers can cash in on a great market, but I think Tom's been saying that for awhile now.

How does your company take advantage of today's key markets, boomers/geezers and women??

Our Very Own (non military) War

I attended a conference last week that was trying to encourage a multi-agency (Comprehensive) approach to the solution of (Inter) national security issues. Rarely have I felt such a sense of despair. One senior civil servant after another stood up and reeled off excuse after excuse ... blaming everyone but themselves. The conclusion officially was that we are enjoying "sub-optimal state response" to the resolution of the crisis we face. There was a tiny ray of hope (which led to this blog and request for insight) ... The reason I was there was that "We" (the private sector business community) are held in high regard by many in public service for our ability to overcome personal interests and agendas for the achievement of corporate success ... (I know ... I know ... we'll keep that our dirty little secret ... OK!). They were looking to us to suggest ways the UK civil service could sharpen up its response to terrorism.

The core of the problem (not exclusive to the UK, I'm sure) is that frequently critical decisions that affect our nation's best interests are being compromised for personal gain / self interest. The extent to which civil servants are being allowed to "mark their own homework" is truly frightening. Politicians are (largely) held accountable but it's the "Mandarins" in Whitehall and probably Washington, too, that seem to be inhibiting a high performance response to terrorism. Not the expertise of al-Qaeda. These terrorists / gangsters are relying on our inability to respond in a coordinated way. They are relying on the tribal natures of the Home Office / DFID / Treasury / MOD / Diplomats and the NGO community, et al., to deliver a poorly coordinated and slow response to critical situations.

Why are we as businesspeople so tolerant of non-elected senior civil servants impeding the resolution of international crises? The "War on Terror" is not exclusively a military / Security services affair. Cosy though that thought may be. It is just as much our war on our own drivers of ineffectiveness. It's a real test of the belief that market forces will ensure optimal state performance (à la Capitalism). Well, I'm not seeing much evidence of a high performing state response to terrorism. Are you?

I left the conference no closer to the answer but determined to mine the intelligence of those who frequent Tom's Blog site ... So the question is "What can we as businesspeople do to 'encourage' our senior civil servants to act in our citizens' best interests and not their own?"

The reason to answer this question is ... if we don't, all the interesting stuff we talk about at this site will, I believe, rapidly become pretty irrelevant.

Customer Service Connect

As I read this article about not siloing the customer service department, but, instead, inviting them to the table, it reminded me of the days when I managed a customer service department. I had thought that by now organizations would understand the importance of the customer service front-line workers. I recall that people on the front line knew the customer, and customer issues and concerns better than anyone else in the org, including the salespeople. There was a big disconnect between the customer service department and other support and production areas. One of the first things that I did, when I was in the situation, was to make the production manager my "new best friend."

Has the customer service department risen in organizations yet? Do you value the customer service department where you are? If not, what must change to be sure that the customer service department is "rockin'"?

Liberation!
The Situation Is Hopeless!
Hooray!

GE, by almost all measures, is the rare (only?) enormous American firm that has outperformed the stock market over almost a century. Hence the shock value of Sunday's headline in the biz section of the New York Times: "Is GE Too Big for Its Own Good?" Observers, including many on Wall Street, are beginning to whisper, "Break it up," following a half dozen years of flaccid performance.

The day before I'd been lecturing in Nairobi—and the first two rows of the amphitheater had included a staggering share of Kenya's Big Company CEOs. My unrelenting message: Giant companies are stinkers when it comes to long-term performance.

A few of the slides I used:

"[Richard] Foster and his McKinsey colleagues collected detailed performance data stretching back 40 years for 1,000 U.S. companies. They found that none of the long-term survivors managed to outperform the market. Worse, the longer companies had been in the database, the worse they did."—Financial Times

"The difficulties ... arise from the inherent conflict between the need to control existing operations and the need to create the kind of environment that will permit new ideas to flourish—and old ones to die a timely death. ... We believe that most corporations will find it impossible to match or outperform the market without abandoning the assumption of continuity. ... The current apocalypse—the transition from a state of continuity to state of discontinuity—has the same suddenness [as the trauma that beset civilization in 1000 A.D.]"—Richard Foster & Sarah Kaplan, "Creative Destruction" (The McKinsey Quarterly)

"Of Korea's Top 100 companies in 1955, only seven were still on the list in 2004. The 1997 financial crisis 'destroyed half of Korea's 30 largest conglomerates.'"—from "KET Issue Report," Kim Jong Nyun

"I am often asked by would-be entrepreneurs seeking escape from life within huge corporate structures, 'How do I build a small firm for myself?' The answer seems obvious: Buy a very large one and just wait."—Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics

"A pattern emphasized in the case studies in this book is the degree to which powerful competitors not only resist innovative threats, but actually resist all efforts to understand them, preferring to further entrench their positions in the older products. This results in a surge of productivity and performance that may take the old technology to unheard-of heights. But in most cases this is a sign of impending death."—Jim Utterback, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation

"The more successful a company, the flatter its forgetting curve."—Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad

"You don't get better by being bigger. You get worse."—Dick Kovacevich, CEO, Wells Fargo

"Despite a decade of banking mergers, there is no evidence that big banks are any more efficient or profitable than their smaller rivals."—Financial Times, on possible Barclays-ABN Amro merger ("When it comes to asking the stock market whether bigger banks are better, the current answer is a resounding 'no.'"—Citigroup analysis, 2006)

"'Good management' was the most powerful reason [leading firms] failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership."—Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma, on the conservatism that cripples very large firms

"Recently I asked three corporate executives what decisions they had made in the last year that would not have been made were it not for their corporate plans. All had difficulty identifying one such decision. Since all of the plans are marked 'secret' or 'confidential,' I asked them how their competitors might benefit from possession of their plans. Each answered with embarrassment that their competitors would not benefit."—Russell Ackoff (from Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning)

One Kenyan CEO asked if I truly thought there was, effectively, no hope for the Giants. I wandered around the issue and concluded, "Yup, no hope."

So what the hell was the point of the seminar, the point of my 7,000 mile trip, at least for the Big Co gang?

Plenty, I think.

That is "no hope" is a dire warning that typical, conservative Big Co strategies are indeed designs for disaster. And I think that is liberating. The message is, "The odds are stacked against you, hence you in effect have damn near nothing to lose—so swing for the fences and you at least up the odds a bit of performing well."

I often say (and did again in Kenya) that I've learned but one thing in 40 years, since I began my management career as a military (Navy) construction engineer in Vietnam in 1966. And that is ... "try stuff" ... faster than the next guy. ("We have a 'strategic plan.' It's called doing things."—Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines.) And keep on tryin' stuff.

Hence this "ultimate" slide on success and failure:

Life 101: A 40-year Reflection

Go on offense.
Give everybody a shot.
Decentralize.
Try a bunch of stuff.
Make it up as you go along.
Get some stuff wrong.
Laugh a lot.
Get some stuff right.
Who knows, you might get lucky ...

Or:

Extract "lessons learned" or "best practices."
Thicken the Book of Rules for Success.
Become evermore serious.
Enforce the rules to increasingly tight tolerances.
Go on defense.
Install walls.
Protect-at-all-costs today's franchise.
Centralize.
Calcify.
Install taller walls.
Write more rules.
Become irrelevant and-or die.

Attached you'll find a very brief PowerPoint, from the sub-section titled "Try It" in the section called "Innovation Tactics" in Part II of our Master Presentation ("Innovate. Or. Die.")

Kenya 2007

Kenya, per my analysis, was the SIXTY-FOURTH country in which I have been lucky enough to present. And to say "the best of the lot" would be an insult to my many wonderful hosts, from OMAN to MAURITIUS to NEW ZEALAND to SIBERIA. But I'm tempted. I have rarely, if ever, had such a warm welcome (to Susan & me); I have rarely, if ever, had such wonderful interactions with seminar participants. So I'll simply send along the slides—and offer a hearty "thanks and Godspeed" to my new friends from Nairobi, et al. (See you soon, I hope.)

[Slides from the event in Nairobi, where Tom spoke to close to 500 clients comprised of CEOs and top management who are clients of KPMG Training Solutions, are available with the links below.—CM]
Excellence. Always. Section One, KPMG, Nairobi
Excellence. Always. Section Two, KPMG, Nairobi

Cool Friend: Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Someone in the household must take time away from work to care for children or aging parents. That duty requires work flexibility and a non-linear career path, and most often falls to the woman. As the founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy, Sylvia Ann Hewlett has been researching the transitions into and out of careers, and, as a result, has written Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success. Erik talked with her about it, and she became our latest Cool Friend. Read the interview (and the book) to find out what some very large companies are doing to make it easier for you to work and live.

Where's Tom?

Tom has been silent for two weeks as he went walkabout in Africa. He should be finishing up his computer-less hiatus very soon, and we'll be glad to have him return. Until he gets back in touch, however, we'd like to remind you once more about his Master Slides. He worked to get the presentation completed before his break, and we hope you'll take this opportunity to take a look.

Part 1: Context. Excellence.
Part 2: Innovation. The case.
Part 3: Up the Value-added Ladder. Solutions-PSF-Experiences-Dreams-Lovemarks.
Part 4: "New" Market Opportunities. Women. Boomers & Geezers. Women as Tomorrow's Leaders.
Part 5: Brand You. Talent. Leadership for Excellence by Passion & Persistence.
Part 6: Key Lists: "The Irreducible 209." "Us"-"Them." Etc.
Part 7: Talent 50. Leadership 50.

Sentence Spartan

We've been hearing a lot lately about the struggle to keep your email inbox under control. Our Cool Friend Mark Hurst outlines a scheme in his book, Bit Literacy. Lifehack.org tries to help you avoid email bankruptcy. Today, Biz Stone pointed to an appealing strategy: three.sentenc.es. You choose a number—two through five—that will be your personal sentence limit when responding to any email. Committing to curbing verbosity might just make the task of responding to all those emails less overwhelming. Have any other inbox-wrestling tips to share with us? Or are you more of a Cool Friend Dave Freedman Perfect Mess fan?

OOPS! How Did That Happen?

It's been a bumpy few weeks for the UK's public broadcaster, the BBC. Following a couple of rather unfortunate PR spats [http://media.guardian.co.uk, free registration required], the Director General has sent out an email to all employees encouraging them to be vigilant and to report any lapses in the high broadcast standards that they set for themselves.

What a double-edged sword the BBC's management faces. On the one hand, the integrity of the corporation must be one of its most precious assets and lapses of trust cannot be tolerated. Yet on the other hand, their people (employees and contractors alike) are facing unprecedented professional competition. Attracting audiences has never been tougher, and it is easy to see how such pressure drives people into situations of experimentation and risk-taking. Tom's axiom SAV (screw around vigorously!) comes to mind.

Whilst I am certainly not in favour of sloppiness or lax standards, I am in favour of innovation and creativity. My main worry in this situation is that anxiety about public criticism will lead talented people within the BBC to play safe. What a pity that would be, as I, for one, would hate to see the BBC marginalised.

But this double-edged sword applies to any organisation that can find the public spotlight trained on their actions. Risk assessment these days often seems to me to end up meaning that organisations play far too safe—for example, the ultra-cautious attitude that many schools in the UK now take towards children's venture expeditions. (Many of them simply don't offer such expeditions any longer.)

So, is it possible to have a risk-taking large organisation, or is that an oxymoron? Who knows of any large organisations that have grappled with this dilemma successfully?

Widgets

As you can see, we've added a few new features to our posts. We're catching the Web 2.0 wave and trying to make it easier for you to share what you read here with your friends and colleagues. Below each post, you'll still see the name of the author, the date it's posted, the permalink (the permanent web location for each post), a link to comment (join the conversation!), and the category. You'll now also see a row of icons.

The envelope allows you to email the post to a friend. The colored blocks next to the envelope link to del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site. If you click on the blocks, you can save the post as a bookmark that you can share with your network. The green SU is the icon for StumbleUpon, a great way to discover new sites. You can save the post to your StumbleUpon account and share it with others by clicking on this icon. Next to the StumbleUpon icon is a little guy with a shovel. This is the icon that lets you to submit the post to Digg. Digg is a social bookmarking site that's well known for its post promotion feature that rates the most popular posts. Next to Digg's icon is the alien from reddit. Reddit is similar to Digg in its features, with a focus on rating posts. The last icon links to Technorati. If you click on this link, you can see which blogs are linking to this post. Soon we'll be adding a feature that will indicate how many blogs are linking to each post. We're also planning to add trackbacks.

Our intention with these changes is to facilitate conversation. We love experimenting and we're open to your feedback.

The "Best" Way to Deal With a Termination

The need to upgrade talent can create heart-wrenching decisions for even the most battle-hardened executives and small business owners these days, especially the firing of long-standing employees or partners who may have been critical to the development of the business, but who now appear to stand in the way of progress. But how do you as an executive/owner deal with this?

Pete Best is a mini-case study of how NOT to deal with it—especially if you're a small business. 1) Break the news to the partner through a third party. 2) Don't explain the reasons why the partner is being fired. 3) Don't ever speak to him again (even 45 years later). In this case, the firing became all the more significant to the individual because the small business went on to become a billion-dollar revenue producer.

[read more]

Cool Friend: Mark Hurst

Are you weighed down by the email in your inbox or other bit-heavy electronic detritus? New Cool Friend Mark Hurst has these things to say: "Bits are heavy." "Anybody with an email address could change their life if they read this book." "Bit literacy frees you to finish your work so that you can live your life outside work."

With his book, Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload, Hurst explains why it's a good idea to learn more about your computer than how to turn it on and run a few Microsoft Office programs. He's an expert on making people more productive with technology. Get started on your own journey to weightlessness. Visit the website of Creative Good, the user experience consulting firm that he founded, and now runs with Phil Terry. Or check into his other (Wow!) projects, Gootodo.com, the Gel conference, and GoodExperience.com.

We hope you'll enjoy reading Mark Hurst's Cool Friends interview.

Special Slides: 25

Last week, Tom posted his seven-part Master Slides Presentation (original post here). As usual, Tom included slides in shorthand, numbers only, one word, etc., and if you don't have the luck to attend one of his seminars, you don't have a clue what he means. So, Gene Moorhead of Montgomery, Alabama, wrote to the website asking for an explanation of a slide showing nothing but the numeral 25, and he inspired Tom to compile a new mini-PPT. It seems that Tom met Starbucks Chairman and former CEO Howard Schultz once, and during their conversation, Howard mentioned that—to this day, international expansion notwithstanding—he still visits 25 Starbucks stores a week. That reminded Tom of MBWA (Managing by Wandering Around) from In Search of Excellence. Here, then, is the result: The Magic Number 25 / MBWA / Calendars Never Lie / Excellence. Always.

"You're fired"?

A $10,000 investment in "Mr Trump's empire" in 1994 when it went public would result in a valuation of $636 today. (Source: NY Times/Business Day 0706.2007)

Comments?

Trump II

Is Trump's staying power, given the likes of the above, "proof" that "Excellence in 'Brand You' Development" trumps skill?

Who Woulda Thunk ...

Who would have bet that 2 of the top 3 capitalist growth stories from the first 7 years of the millennium (or ever, for that matter) would have come from an Islamic autocracy and a Communist-to-the-core nation? I refer, of course, to Dubai and China. (India, the third story.)

FYI/Women-in-Management/
Who Woulda Thunk II

Saudi Prince al-Waleed, called "the Middle East's most powerful investor" (The Business, 0516.07), has a 30-person holding company team that boasts over 50% women.

Market Research? (For good or for ill.)

Brand Trump
Brand Martha
Brand Dubai (Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum)
Brand Apple/etc./etc./iPod (Steve)
Brand California Reborn (the Guvenator)

Surely these are among the more stunning Branding-Worldchanging stories of the last 20 years:

How many are the product of careful market research?
How many are the results of visionary insaniac dreamers?
How many are at least partially the product of rather well-developed egos?

(Are there any market-research driven stories of a similar magnitude? Starbucks???)

The Wrong Debate?

I agree. It's appalling that such a wealthy country as the U.S. has over 25 million people, including many children, without healthcare insurance. (Which is not to say I want a Socialist solution.)

But I think the financial-coverage debate should be secondary to a debate-dialogue about what the hell we're buying with the megabucks going into our current healthcare investment.

We spend a ton and a half of money on patching ourselves up ... and rank 40th in life expectancy worldwide.

Correctable, in the main, errors in hospitals cost us over 100,000 lives per year.

Correctable errors cost us perhaps 2 or 3 million wounded in hospitals, doctors offices, etc.

Spending wildly overemphasizes after-the-fact fixes rather than prevention and wellness.

Incentives wildly favor specialists who save a few lives (e.g., mine) and their specialist tools over Internists, Family Practice, and Public Health.

My rant: Let's spend as much time and energy fixing the fixable enumerated above, 99% independent of the insurance debate, and seeing if we can tease out longer lives as a result of our investment. If our life expectancy is so damn low compared to those spending much less, aren't we at some level getting screwed? I know that's crude and bizarrely over-simplistic—but there's also a big kernel of truth to the intemperate statement, isn't there?

(My current picks re healthcare reading:

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande
How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman

Both are excellent writers.)

On Walkabout

I'm heading to Africa tomorrow for walkabout in Botswana and a seminar in Kenya. Be back, God willing (hey, they're beheading folks in Nairobi), in 2 weeks.

A Good Mistake: Leave the Wallet Home

I forgot my wallet on a July 3rd grocery trip. (I'm the designated shopper in the family.) When I got to the grocery store—22 miles from home, the closest—I discovered I'd left my wallet behind. Luckily, I had a secret cash stash in the glove compartment, just for this sort of eventuality. Boy, did I ever empty that stash out in my 5 or 6 stops around town!

So what?

So I, doubtless like you, pay for stuff with plastic. There is many an "ouch" in the process. But the credit-card "ouch" is a far cry from peeling off $138 at the grocery store, $37 to fill a ... Subaru, $77 at one of my "ordinary" stops at the book store, and a couple of others. One's sense of the true cost of living goes up by an order of magnitude.

I'm not sure exactly how to translate this into my or your professional life, but I am (very) sure it would be a damn good idea. For those who are solos or in a small professional office or a small retail operation, I'd urge you some month to repeat my adventure in some form or other; after paying the office supply bill in $20s, I'd bet a pretty penny or 10 that the next month would inaugurate an era of tighter purse strings.

In BigCo world, if you've got departments reporting to you, what about invoicing the dept head in the old fashion way (yes, I know the perils of cost allocation—so what) for services rendered—and demanding that he-she pay the bill by writing a check; not quite as powerful as my deal, but perhaps a start.

The bigger point is obvious, if elusive—bringing reality home in some high-impact way. Not that "work as a clerk for a day" crap—which is just a rather fun game—but something somehow realistic.

Many (many) years ago I did a stint in the Pentagon, working on military construction—Navy bases, etc. One day the Admiral in charge called a few of us into his office. We mostly worked on translating the needs of the field into Pentagonese. The sums were, even then, in the billions—and we abbreviated with $2.3B, etc. The Admiral said we were all too careless with taxpayers' money (an extraordinary statement in the Big 5-sided Building), and that, starting immediately, we'd be required to put in all the zeros; hence $2.3B would now be $2,300,000,000. I can't promise you that this little drill in the end benefited the taxpayer; but I can tell you that it did, as the Admiral intended, make us think twice. A trivial story—or not. You be the judge.

100 Ways to Succeed #91:

The Rule of Realism

Pay for your groceries with cash next time. Your car repair, too. The office supply bill? Ditto.

By hook or by crook, bring Realism in the office door.

On The Other Hand: No Dreamers, No Progress

If inconsistency is a virtue, then here goes. I've come to a conclusion, probably as unsurprising as it gets, but perhaps worth a moment's thought.

Namely: Realism is the death of progress.

We've got a summer building project in progress. We did our levelheaded best to budget it correctly, getting contractors to rework estimates—and redesigning accordingly. (And, hey, I was trained as a construction engineer.) All that said, it looks like the $40K ($40,000—sorry, Admiral) project will come in at about $70,000.

What's new?

The Big Dig in Boston came in about 4 times over budget, as I recall. For the Chunnel, I think it was about 3 times. Etc. Etc. (I won't even mention that the Iraq war, budgeted by Mr Rumsfeld at $50,000,000,000 is apparently at about $1,500,000,000,000—hey, what's a "B" vs "T" in pursuit of ...)

I decided to do a little careless research at a dinner party, asking several people about their homebrew projects. Three questions: How did you do vs. budget for projects completed a couple of years ago? If you'd known the real pricetag when you started, would you have gone ahead? And, in hindsight, was the eventual pricetag worth it?

To Q1, the answer ranged from about 25% over (if you can believe it) to 5 times (which I do believe). As to Q2, 3 of the 6 I queried said "no way" if they'd known what they were getting into—2 others were on the fence. As to after-the-fact satisfaction, 5 said, in effect, "Yes! We'd do it again"—and one said "Maybe, maybe not."

It's obviously dangerous to generalize from such a sample, but my reading of history, business, and in general, says this phenomenon is as ordinary as it gets. Furthermore, in the back of one's mind, one damn well knows that the pricetag will be far in excess of what's planned.

And my point? You'd better have a great number-crunching CFO, but if you let him-her rule the roost, there won't be much left to roost on. Of course I know it's "Damned if you do, damned if you don't." On the other hand, progress hinges on illusion and delusion. As for me, the Cornell master's degree holder in construction engineering, I'd vote yes in hindsight for every one of my major home projects—even if, as is true, they added to my speechifying "nights on the road" tally.

Cherish your dreamers!

100 Ways to Succeed #92:

Got Your Dreamer Quota Aboard?

Who, precisely, are your Dreamers?
Are their Dreams in Technicolor?
Do you allow their most Outrageous Dreams to be seen in public?

(If this sounds odd, think iPhone.)

Duh (I)

"Made in China: Suspect Imports Raise Questions About the Real Value of Getting Lowest Price"—Headline, USA Today, 0703.07.

I'm delighted, at a personal level, to pay less rather than more than expected for an item—stiffed by lost baggage, I was greatly pleased with the $4 underwear I acquired at midnight in Eugene, OR, at Wal*Mart. But I'm also old enough to believe (hangs in there with the Golden Rule) that "Things that are too good to be true are too good to be true."

I have long argued pigheadedly that low-cost producers will eventually get hammered. (It seems to be happening to Dell and Wal*Mart as we speak—or write.) I believe that business's most likely winning hand, especially in the mid- to long-term, is to live near the top of the price-value heap. In short, as I see it, the low-cost producer has little to fall back on when competitors invariably catch up—that is, a shriveled Culture of Innovation; a high-value producer has only stayed there via constant innovation, big and small. Needless to say, I feel exactly the same way about vendors and every other member of the supply chain.

China will rally, I have no doubt of it. But when they do, they won't offer the same "unbelievable" cost advantage. "If it's unbelievable ... "

(Corollary plea: Please, with a few exceptions related to health, let the market take care of this—not my dear fellow Vermonter, Senator Bernie Sanders, and his pals.)

100 Ways to Succeed #93:

Bottom Line

A "Culture of Innovation" tops a "Culture of Hypercontrol."

"Innovation Freaks" win in the Long Run.
(Or, at least, they have more fun losing.)

Please discuss: Once a month.

Cause of Death, ICD

Balance?
Never!

I call it "ICD."
Inherent Centralist Drift.

In response to a Post a while back, there were several Comments that said there must be a Centralization-Decentralization "balance."

Of course!
(Sorta!)

I've devoted my life to the Decentralists Credo.

In short, as I see it, many more (especially large, very large) companies die, or at least, shrivel or cease to lead their industries from too much control, not too little. The biggest reason is an automatic, often invisible, but eventually pronounced drift toward centralization. To get too much centralization, just keep your hands in your pockets. To get or keep a semblance of continued decentralization—fight 24/7, as unfairly as you can.

(It must be "unfair" fighting because the Centralists number among their members 100% of the members of staff departments, otherwise known as "Team 'No.'")

As to "balance"—bad, very bad, word. In short, I cherish tension, despise balance. Let the "balance" emerge, temporarily, from hand-to-hand combat.

(And make sure the Forces of Decentralization and Revenue Maximization are as well armed as the CFO and the "systems guys.")

100 Ways to Succeed #94:

Hail the Decentralization "Warfighters"

Through every means possible, be hyper-aware of ICD (Inherent Centralist Drift).

Talk about it.
Fight about it.
Lose sleep over it.
Ensure that your Decentralists are as well armed as your Centralists.

(Hint: This ICD holds for a 1-person biz as well as for a 10,000-person biz. When you screw up in the 1-person biz, you add controls. A good idea, a necessary one ... until it stifles creativity.)

Duh (II)

"Bangalore Wages Spur 'Reverse Offshoring'"—headline, Page 1, Financial Times, 0702.07

When an incredible amount of work is thrust upon a labor market ... wages go up. As I said: Duh.

(Article substance: In some cases Indian engineers now cost about 80% of the price of the hometown troops. At that differential, "Home sweet home" becomes the song du jour.

Message to the skeptics, again, especially in Washington and on CNN (yes, you, Lou): Markets work.

Brand Bleed-through

A confession first ... I came late to the Apple brand and I fell hard. I love the design, and the products always work beyond my expectations! I have one iPod for running, one for biking, and a waterproof one for swimming! I didn't feel the need to stand in line for the iPhone on Friday, but I had one in my hands early Saturday nonetheless. It is as beautiful a design as I have come to expect from Cupertino.

Then things when south. My experience with AT&T/Cingular has not enamored me to their brand. The simple iTunes activation was just that—until we got to the AT&T part. Disaster. My pre-approved credit authorization at the store wasn't accepted online. I called the help line. Long wait only to be informed that I had to return to the store. (Seems the long wait had to do with them being overwhelmed with the volume of customers ... don't they read the business press? DUH.) People at the store told me to call AT&T support. I asked to speak with a supervisor at AT&T help desk. She had several calls in the cue for her. (Big surprise.) I hung up. The store tech called back with a workaround, but I would have to sign up with a Tennessee phone number (where I bought the phone) and I live in Michigan. No thanks. Eventually I just ignored all the pre-authorization work I had done at the store and started fresh with the activation. It worked. Final glitch: The AT&T/Cingular service map clearly showed I was in their service area. Well, my front room is, but the kitchen apparently isn't (I have a small house!). Signal strength is terrible. Enough bitching.

Here is the issue to me. By entering an insane agreement with AT&T as the sole carrier for the iPhone, the Apple brand is intimately connected to them. I believe after the early adopters, sales will fall if AT&T doesn't get their act together. I am greatly surprised at Apple, as I have found they are really careful not to release products before their time. I would have thought they would have made sure AT&T was ready. So now I will sum it up this way ... great iPod, lousy phone service.

Master Work

Tom put a great deal of effort into his Master Slides that we featured on Tuesday. The result is a compendium of almost all the PowerPoint slides Tom ever fashioned. All of Tom's favorite themes are expounded on, so we think it's important to keep a mention at the top of the heap. To see the links to the seven-part Excellence Always Master, go to the original post here. pharmacy viagra

231

My GRP yesterday was three. That is, Gross Rock Product. I've been clearing hiking trails on the Farm, and specifically clearing around gorgeous boulders on Tinmouth Mountain. Today I eked out 3 hours of hard labor—and revealed, sort of "Zen-like," three spectacular boulders, the largest of which was 6 X 12 X 8 feet. Hence a Gross Rock Product of three.

As I headed for a long hot shower that I hoped would reduce my back pain to mere agony, I thought about home writ large, Tinmouth Mountain, Vermont, and the United States of America—and our 231st July Fourth. I/we are lucky—300 million lucky dudes—rancor shadowing Iraq notwithstanding. The Freedoms I "automatically" express and enjoy on my Farm and in my professional life are truly amazing, especially if your reference point is a scant 250 years ago—as I mentioned in a recent Post, I'm reading about the history of the idea of freedom per se. For me, born in 1942, I am also reminded on 4 July of the state of terror that existed in the world when I arrived—i.e., Holocaust and human butchery in general were in full swing.

Hence, putting the likes of Middle Eastern madness and views about this year's decisions by the Supremes aside for 24 hours, we have much to be thankful for, much to be worthy of a hot dog with catsup lathered with reckless disregard of its effect on post-July Fourth girth.

Back to the rocks ...

Thanks!

A friend is heading home on leave from Iraq today. I thought I'd write him a note—then I decided to publish it here:

Dear _____, I am at an uncharacteristic loss for words. Hence, I don't know what to say other than "Thank you." As we both know, the war is a contentious issue here in the Homeland. Many think we must indeed stay the course; at least as many think the war is a reckless, counterproductive disaster.

Well, history is my hobby, and there is nothing new under the sun. On 4 July 1776, the majority of our Colonist forebears thought war with Great Britain was sheer madness. And so it has been ever since. Civil War proponents and opponents, North and South, were about evenly divided—and insanely passionate about their respective views. In WWI, Wilson was seen as a madman. In the "obvious" WWII where the stakes were "clear," millions upon millions thought FDR was a mad warmonger. And we all know about "my war"—Vietnam. I was in I Corps-Danang for the 4th in 1966—while at Kent State just a couple of years later the level of disputatiousness rose to a point where domestic blood flowed, children's blood no less.

The Middle East is a godawful mess. We will argue for 100 years about the rightness or wrongness of the path we have chosen. But whether through diplomacy or arms, there must be some sort of resolution, most especially for the sake of your children and mine—that's always the point in the long run.

So thank you, from the bottom of my heart—especially on this special day. Your stunning sacrifice and willingness to voluntarily place yourself in Harm's Way is the price, alas, virtually every generation has borne to honor that tiny band of "insaniacs" (later called "Founding Fathers") who concluded on this date 231 years ago that their flavor of Freedom was important enough to merit David bearding Goliath—the odds of their success on 07.04.1776 were miniscule, the price of their almost certain failure, unspeakable.

Thank you, TJP

No Thanks

My discomfort rose as I wrote the above Posts. Hence I choose—for whatever reason—to unbind my emotion and end this July 4th Post on a perhaps off key, clearly downbeat note. Irreducible fact: I admittedly carry a grudge 40 years on—bile rises when I think of those who labored, and labored mightily, to avoid service in Vietnam. I am no hero, but that is not the point—I did serve and wear jungle fatigues. Willingly. And despite that white hot back pain described above, I'd do it again if asked. My pen begs me to ...

(Sorry, I am unable not to conclude this way—I can only imagine the Comments. Where would I most like to be on the 4th? As I've been only once on this date, at the wall with 58,000 names, chatting up a few of my missing pals.)

Excellence, Version 2007!
A Seven-part Harmony!
The Best I Can Do!

Since my last speech, on June 3rd, I have, for the most part, been ignoring one and all. The reason is a project I finished this morning. I have thoroughly (more thoroughly than in years) revised the Master Presentation. Literally thousands of small edits, a substantial body of new slides, and reorganization have been chalked up.

The result is a seven part presentation—including roughly 2,700 slides.

The parts are:

Part One: Context. Excellence. "Must dos."
Part Two: Innovation. The case. Tactics (e.g., SAV—Screw Around Vigorously).
Part Three: Climbing-clawing Up-up-up-up the Value-added Ladder. Solutions-The Essential Professional Service Firm model-Experiences-Dreams-Lovemarks.
Part Four: Staggering "New" Market Trillion-dollar opportunities—still neglected. Women. Boomers & Geezers. Women. "Best fit" as Tomorrow's Leaders.
Part Five: "People." Brand You imperative. "Talent," best Roster wins. Leadership for Excellence by Passion & Persistence.
Part Six: Key Lists (E.g., "The Irreducible 209." "Us"-"Them.").
Part Seven: The "Talent 50," The Leadership 50."

I may subsequently add a few light annotations ... but this is "it" ... all of it ... my best shot ... for now. I hope it's useful; it exists for you to steal!

Remember:

Excellence.
Always. brand viagra on sale in canada

Happy 10th Anniversary, Brand You!

Reading and commenting on Nick's blog of June 29th, I realized that this is the tenth anniversary of the publication of "The Brand Called You" in Fast Company magazine (the actual date was August/September 1997; it seems like yesterday!). This is a good occasion for everyone to revisit that article and take a refresher course in why Brand You is so important. And, for those who've never read it, it's a good time to take a first look. Happy Anniversary to Tom and the Brand Called You!