The Decent Thing to Do Is the Smart Thing to Do

Going back 25 years to 1982 and In Search of Excellence, Bob Waterman and I were simply interested in what made for excellent corporate performance. We didn't have much in the way of pre-conceived notions. Delightfully, our research showed that some very human "basics"—doing rather than talking, focusing on the growth and wellbeing of our people and our customers, and being clear about "what we care about around here"—were the apparent bedrock of superior performance. Five years on, my Thriving on Chaos snuck into print. Needless to say I was pleased when Hoover Institute reviewer Paul Weaver wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "Mr Peters is an enthusiast, a storyteller and a lover of capitalism. He is saying [in Thriving on Chaos] that effective management is management that delivers more value to customers and more opportunity for service, creativity and growth to workers. He is saying that the decent thing to do is also the smart thing. It's a wonderful message."

Immersed in a somewhat leisurely summer, and on the verge of the 25th birthday of Search, I have been thinking about what the good or bad or indifferent practice of management is all about. Notwithstanding the very real threat posed by nihilistic terrorists, I do believe that entrepreneurial capitalism is the strongest force possible for unleashing human potential and perhaps a relatively peaceable kingdom—from Tinmouth Vermont to Dubai to Nairobi. And, by and large, successful entrepreneurial capitalism depends upon the effective practice of management. And if you believe Paul Weaver—"Effective management is management that delivers more value to customers and more opportunity for service, creativity and growth to workers. ... The decent thing to do is also the smart thing"—effective management is humanistic management. With such grand "stuff" circling in my brain, I composed a rambling piece that you'll find here. It is no more than a halting effort to answer, "What's it all about, Alfie?"

Long Time Coming!

I've had a "just around the corner" project just around the corner for literally years. Namely, a non-trivial Annotation of my Master Slide Presentation. At a dinner last weekend, I got into a discussion with a woman financial services exec, and we turned to the sorry (still!) state of women in senior management in financial services. I offered to send her "a few good quotes" via the women-boomers-geezers-"new" markets Section of the Master. Deciding I wanted it to be useful without me on a stage, I spent most of the last 2 days annotating. I'd call it Lite+ annotation. In any case, it at least explains the obscure #s and the like that dot the presentation. I have no idea whether or not I'll annotate the rest, but this is a start. Please tell me your reaction—i.e., does it help?

Brand You50 Revisited

Cody McKibben, who blogs at ThrillingHeroics.com, has written a review of Tom's Brand You50. But more importantly, for those of you who prefer a Cliff's Notes summary, he's created his own shorthand version. Thanks, Cody.

Reinvention:
All in a Day's Work

For those of us who spend our days at tompeters.com or Tom Peters Company, a sentence like this jumps off the page: "He believes he always needs to reinvent himself, which is why he developed a cut fastball to go along with his high heat, split-fingered pitch ..." I found it in this article about Jonathan Papelbon, where he describes his new pitch ... the slutter.

Then I realized that it shouldn't come as a surprise that a professional athlete lives with reinvention on his mind and in his repertoire. Any day could bring a trade, an injury, a slump. And, at the end of their careers—the ultimate reinvention. Sometime after the age of thirty(?), forty(?), fifty if they're extremely lucky, they all must re-imagine themselves. And Tom's message, for years, has been that the rest of us have to look at our careers the same way. Are your Brand You skills and reputation polished to the point where you could replace your livelihood overnight?

Patient Safety as Job One

Good for Medicare! It will stop covering claims that stem from preventable errors. [NYT, 19 Aug 2007]

Hospital administrators are screaming about more paperwork snarls. I agree. Paperwork will get worse. Definitions are mushy. Cheating—attributing adverse outcomes to nonpreventable causes—will take place. Willingness to admit errors will decline, even plummet.

While I acknowledge the problems associated with the new regime, and even acknowledge the severity of said problems, I can only say to my hospital administrator friends, "You asked for it!" Medicare is using a blunt weapon out of frustration. Hospitals are, in my experience, now focusing on preventable errors, no doubt of it. But there is an enormous gap between "focusing on" and becoming "fully devoted to." That is, there are now numerous patient safety "programs"—but few on the order, say, of American industry's 179-degree about face-strategic realignment on product quality in the 1980s. There is little doubt that we lose far more lives to preventable errors (like those that stem from the failure to wash hands carefully!) than we save via sexy new surgical procedures. I once told a group of hospital CIOs that implementing electronic medical records would allow them to save more lives than the entire surgery department—perhaps that's an exaggeration, but not by much.

So I pray on bended knee, especially as an "old guy," that such blunt instruments as the new Medicare policy will encourage, at gunpoint if necessary, hospital administrators to move patient safety off the "important programs" list and instead to the top of the "strategic survival right f***ing now" issues list—and keep it there until the problem is brought under control. Remember, the definition of "preventable" is "preventable"—and the bulk of the fix is not cost intensive. Recall how "quality is free" went from consultants' gag line to Holy Writ in industry—and turned out to be true.

Chinese Hegemony?

Economist and former MIT biz school dean Lester Thurow has been wrong about a bunch of things per my assessment. Nonetheless, he is smart and undoubtedly worth reading. And in yesterday's New York Times Week in Review section he offered a fascinating hypothesis in "A Chinese Century? Maybe It's the Next One." Thurow argues clearly, without resort to economist double-speak, that Chinese productivity figures are probably wildly overstated. The point is not to dismiss China's amazing progress, but to suggest that we not base micro- or macro-economic policy or security policy, especially in the short term, on the idea that China will eat our (American, European, Japanese) lunch economically, and thence geopolitically, in the next couple of decades. Thurow does not offer the "China will make mistakes" scenario, but instead says that even if China does not make mistakes, it'll probably be 100 years, or even more, before they "catch up" with the likes of us Americans.

Dismissing China's progress would be a disaster. Wildly overstating China's "inevitable march to Global Hegemony" would also be a disaster. Thurow may be wrong, but his argument is worth absorbing in some detail.

WWI, or Web War One

The September issue of Wired is, as usual, chockablock with SWR—stuff worth reading. I was "taken" (mesmerized!) by "WWI," the story of last May's full-fledged cyberattack ("botnet attack") on Estonia, the most wired country in Europe. Among the savvy members of this Blog community, perhaps I'm the last to know the story—but the "imbedded journalist" (more or less) tale of the attack, a true attack on national sovereignty orchestrated by the Estonians moving a WWII Russian war memorial, was stunning in both the details and the implications thereof.

If you buy the journalists' story—and I can't see why one wouldn't—this was indeed WWI, and we are woefully unprepared, and in fact uninterested in being prepared on an appropriate scale, for what will doubtless be a Dark Black Swan in our collective futures, tomorrow at dawn or a decade from now. The results of said failure to prepare on an appropriate (BIG!) scale could be calamitous.

Sad to say, the lack of attentiveness to the cyberassault problem, like the ineffectualness of many of our anti-terrorist measures, heats up the "survivalist" in me—which ain't so pretty.

Slides: ESPN

Tom spoke on Wednesday to on-air talent at ESPN's homeport of Bristol, CT. Storms and testy telecoms connections delayed our posting of his ESPN slides. But they are now available with this link.

Football: Failing Forward Fast

We all know Tom is a die-hard San Francisco 49ers football fan. (Yes, American football.) But in this article from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in which he is asked his opinion about a pre-season game, Tom likes what he hears about the new coach of the Miami Dolphins and his attitude toward young players and failing the first time out.

"My Summer Vacation"

As you know, I haven't been Posting a lot in the last few weeks. True, I've had seminars in Kenya and Brazil, but my calendar is mainly filled with blanks.

My craft this summer has been brush-cutting and landscaping. I've been putting in about 6 hours a day at it—each session ends when exhaustion makes it end. Typically, I do one in the morning around 7:30 a.m., and one in late afternoon, around 4 p.m. I religiously avoid the midday sun.

Yes, I love Posting and love seminar-ing. But I can honestly say that this has given me more pleasure than anything in recent, or not so recent, memory.

First, there is one helluva lot to say for doing outdoor work in the sun, hour after hour, to that point of exhaustion. This may be particularly true for those of us who spend most of our lives parked at a keyboard or parked in a conference chair or parked on a tarmac. Our primal bodies need this sort of thing! And while regular exercise is great, this is of a whole different character—this is really participating in the outdoor world, not just using it to tone heart muscles, important as that is. Second, this is a seriously cool project of my own design; doing heavy-duty yard (farm) work is one thing, and rewarding—but creating something that you dreamed up is a whole different deal. Third, every day brings surprises. Nothing beats surprises! (E.g., I didn't even know that wonderful boulder was there, as it was covered with brush! What a beauty!) This project started out as a simple effort to clean out a stream filled with debris from the forest in which it started—perhaps 20 years of debris. But the "work" meandered and grew day by day into this opportunity to create a fascinating, enchanting zen-like space that reveals a smidgen of the magnificence of this little piece of Southern Vermont heaven. I never know how the day is going to proceed—how sweet that is. Fourth, this project doesn't aim to impress a soul. At 64, I still have hundreds of stomach-knotting "final exams" every year—my 65 or so speeches where expectations are invariably ridiculously high and a "bad day at the office" is not an option, and the likes of the numerous Posts at this Blog (not every Post is a home run, or even a single, but every one is the creation and exposure of something that will be measured by an incredibly diverse crowd. I am "my own man," and somewhat known for my independence of thought—but there are always those external customers, up to 3 or 4 thousand at a speech, tens of thousands here at tompeters.com. Each one is an examining magistrate. Well, there is one customer for this project—me. To be sure, Susan, the artist in the family and a first-rate gardener, offers suggestions, and we and various visitors will use, and perhaps appreciate, the space. But I firmly feel that I am doing this for the sheer joy of doing it, unbidden. Hall of Fame basketball player Larry Bird was once asked what he wanted his epitaph to be; surprisingly, he said that he wanted to have played as hard at practices where not a soul was in attendance as in Game 7 of a World Championship series. Nice.

So that's the deal. Why am I posting less? Because I'm out in the yard (on the farm) doin' my thing, and when I'm not in the yard I'm recovering from that work, and bandaging a thousand cuts from brambles (it looks like I stepped on a mine and barely survived, a friend said—no photos attached) and putting ice on twisted ankles and the like.

A Black Swan Moment

I've mentioned and recommended Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, perhaps a half dozen times in recent months.

And here I go again, with both urgency and amusement.

We are muddling through a Black Swan moment—and paying the price for overconfidence in the likes of mathematical models that encompass our financial infrastructure. Market turbulence is at a high pitch, and may get higher. The mathematically-based derivative markets, accounting for trillions of dollars, are getting whacked. And Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I suspect, is laughing his a#^ off.

In The Black Swan, he tells us that most of our professional efforts are aimed at understanding and mastering phenomena that are explainable. (Duh.) But such efforts are positively useless, nay, dangerous, when that nutty outlier drops down for a landing. His data, in fact, show that in case after case (e.g., the stock market) the lion's share of long-term variation is attributable to a tiny number of Black Swan events—perhaps 5 in 50 years.

So our boy (girl) mathematical geniuses have bet the farm—gajillions of farms—on models that have almost zero immunity to Black Swans; in fact, their and their bosses' naïve (stupid!) overconfidence is a primary cause of their under-preparedness and the subsequent impact.

Rudy Giuliani may well become president. If so, it will be because of a Black Swan—his reaction, in a very lengthy career of public service, on a single day to a Very Black Swan.

Can you prepare for a Black Swan? In one sense, no, at least not specifically; that's the whole point. But you can, at a minimum, consider the degree to which your actions and procedures concerning damn near everything, and likewise those of your organizations, rest on assumptions of continuity. (Hint: They do.) Of course China is a "shock to the system"—but, in fact, it has taken and will take decades for its impact to unfold. I'm talking about the events of a day or a week that could unravel a life's work—or make you president of the U.S.A.

Your life most probably will be made or unmade by the arrival of one, two, or three Black Swans.

So ...

Classics

Few people read more business books than our friend Todd Sattersten over at 800-CEO-READ. So when he takes the time to pick THE five that every executive should read, well, we listen. And not just because we wholeheartedly agree with including the third book on his list (an, ahem, excellent choice).

Cool Friend: Penelope Trunk

Penelope Trunk's book is Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, about which, in her Cool Friends interview, she says, "I thought my audience was young people in the workplace. But, in fact, management loves buying my book. They buy it in huge quantities to understand how to recruit and retain Generation Y." Through her column of the same name featured on Yahoo! Finance and her column "The Climb," which runs in the Boston Globe, Penelope has established herself as an authority on Generations X and Y, how they work, and how Baby Boomers, et al., can work with them. She speaks from experience, having gone through two start-ups, an IPO, an acquisition, and a bankruptcy. And before any of that, she was a professional beach volleyball player!

Read her Cool Friends interview here. You can also visit her website, www.penelopetrunk.com, and blog, blog.penelopetrunk.com, to read more.

Marketing to Women,
10-Year Review

Dori Molitor, in a pdf titled "Ten Years After" (published at the Hub), writes, "It's been nearly ten years since Tom Peters declared women to be the 'most powerful economic force on the planet' and Faith Popcorn's EVEolution defined the marketing-to-women movement as an all-out business revolution. ... Were Tom and Faith wrong? Or did marketers fail to take the kind of bold actions needed to realize the full potential of women's economic clout?"

You can download the complete article here.

"Hard Is Hard"

Bob Waterman and I got our 15 minutes of fame in part by the assertion-slogan-axiom that "Hard is soft. Soft is hard." In the Age of Strategy, circa 1982, we said it's the "hard" plans and budgets and #s that are in fact "soft" (fast forward, think Enron); and it's the "soft" people-customers-relationships-entrepreneurial culture that are truly "hard," that is, the Bedrock of Excellence.

Well, there are exceptions to every rule, even ours. Big ones, in fact.

Prime Minister Emeritus Lee made miracles in Singapore. The keystone: Singapore works! And work it does, starting with friendly and efficient immigration services in Singapore's sparkling airport. PM Lee unabashedly micromanaged his island, and at the heart of the matter was ease of doing business—and that started with immigration controls, baggage retrieval, and the speed with which one could get settled downtown and get down to business.

And if the trains and planes don't run on time? It's possible that the Greatest of "Soft" (service economy-based) Economic Marvels may face life-threatening consequences.

It took me 2+ hours (!) in snarled traffic yesterday to get from the airport to my hotel just outside of São Paulo. A transit strike turned SP's nightmarish traffic into whatever is worse than a nightmare. And this on the heels of the air traffic fiasco that led to the sacking of Brazil's Defense Minister a couple of weeks ago. Perversely, as I rode to town, or the outskirts thereof, I was reading the 0802 International Herald Tribune, which featured on P1 an article titled, "Trains, Planes and Tube: It's a Right British Mess." In short, the infrastructure in the UK is broken, shattered actually. And some of the experts quoted in the article argue, correctly as I see it, that the British Economic Miracle is threatened by F$%^ed up infrastructure. PM Lee would doubtless nod in hearty agreement. Wee case in point: I, for one, now effectively refuse to fly to Heathrow. My 300K FF miles I saw on my latest Lufthansa report attest to the fact that I've done a damn good job of avoiding Jolly Olde England for the last year. (The cost to British Air is in excess of $50,000 in my solo case. E.G.: On Susan's and my July trip to Botswana-Kenya, we would normally have left a day early and visited with her stable of English relatives—and spent a few or more pounds on everything from taxis to tea at Fortnum & Mason. Instead we went via KLM through Amsterdam—where, among other things, we spent $800 at the airport on German-made binoculars.)

More perverse still, as I waited in Dulles for my plane to São Paulo, I watched on CNN the first reports of the bridge collapse in the U.S. of A.—another entity beset with Big League "basic" infrastructure woes. And on the more "modern" front, even Dubai, home of the instant construction miracles, is suffering from health that is too rosy—last month's short trip from downtown to the airport, well, sucked. (Like Singapore, Dubai's magical strengths also depend on "stuff that works," which indeed also starts with friendly, efficient immigration services upon arrival.)

"Soft" (people, customers), is indeed "hard"—that Bedrock of Excellence. But let's never underestimate the fact that "Hard is Hard" too! PM Lee, where are you when we (all) need you?

The Case For Perpetual Revolution:
Not Optional

india canada viagra I am speaking today at an "offsite" leadership conference for Odebrecht. The firm is a fast-growing global player with about $12 billion (U.S.) in revenue, principally from Infrastructure construction and petrochemicals. These days, Brazil is frequently mentioned alongside China, India, and Russia as one of the Big 4 economies of the future—and Odebrecht is emblematic of Brazil's probable rosy future. Odebrecht emphasizes "entrepreneurial technology," and a principal focus of this conference is keeping the keystone entrepreneurial spirit alive in the face of growth and enormity—no small feat.

When one finds in one's hotel room a book about the company written by an insider, the appropriate response is to groan. Which is exactly what I did when I found Education Through Work, by Norberto Odebrecht, weighing in at 599 pages, on my bed. Little did I expect it to keep me up half the night—especially when it was competing with both jet lag and the latest from Daniel Silva, The Secret Servant. But read it I did, and Education Through Work is a superb work that explores the philosophy and reality of the idea of Entrepreneurial Technology. I am especially keen on leaders who look the enemy squarely in the eye. And Sr Odebrecht does just that: "Data drawn from the real world attest to a fact that is beyond our control: Everything in existence tends to deteriorate."

Amen. And what a clarion call to action, especially in these brutally competitive times that do indeed call for "perpetual revolution" and command the Ultimate Sanction to those who fail to appreciate the new economic realities.

(I'll let you know how it comes out.)

[PPT link is below.—CM]
Excellence. Always. Odebrecht, São Paulo, Brazil

The Big Train
Pulled Out Of The Station ...

One hundred years ago today, on 2 August 1907, Walter Johnson took the mound for the first of his 802 lifetime appearances for the Washington Senators baseball team. He lost that day, but went on to win 411 games with a fastball that may never have been equaled.

I grew up 30 miles from Washington, and saw my first major league game at Griffith Stadium in D.C., probably about 1949. Though some of my learned fellow baseball pals of that era were Christy Matthewson [NY Giants hall of fame pitcher] defenders, I was adamant that The Big Train, as he was called, was the best pitcher ever. In fact, I still am adamant.

So Happy 100, ghost of The Big Train.

(Why does this belong in this Blog? Because it's a gorgeous, hot summer day—and if you are not musing on Walter Johnson today, then in my book you've got a problem. And, since this is, in a sense, my "book" ...)

Quote of the Day

"Unlike typical big companies, News Corp. isn't known for crafting and pursuing detailed, long-term business strategies. Instead, Mr. Murdoch follows his instincts, grabbing opportunities when they arise and sometimes giving them up just as quickly." (Wall Street Journal, 01 August 2007)

First There Was The Word.
And The Word Was "Non-linear."

"Futurist" is a word uttered with a sneer often as not ... and deservedly so. But there are, as usual, exceptions ...

Consider: Alvin Toffler. He and his wife Heidi have gotten so much so right before so many of us. Future Shock and The Third Wave, among others, pegged most of today's conundrums and opportunities and snares 20 or more years ago. To the penny, more often than not.

Hence, what a great pleasure it was, exhausted though I was following a 22-hour journey from Boston, to see Mr T standing in the entryway to my hotel outside of São Paulo as I arrived. He was leaving, having finished his remarks to the top execs of Odebrecht, the Brazilian-headquartered multi-national.

Our conversation quickly veered to China, as it tends almost automatically to do these days when any two or more business folks collide. And he said something I fervently believe: "Who knows what will happen, but no historical trajectory is linear."

Amen!
As in: AMEN!!

China's march since Deng's endorsement of wealth creation roughly 25 years ago does indeed follow a remarkably smooth upward path. But if history is any guide, there will indeed be "outlier" events that confound the current process. We digressed to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "black swans" [The Black Swan], my favorite digression these days. Ever so much of where we are at a given time, personally or organizationally, is determined by the tiniest set of "black swans"—outlier events not imagined, or even imaginable, until they have become history.

So, "the word" for the day (any day! Every day!): non-linear.

Life is non-linear.
Progress, if indeed there be progress, is non-linear.

A very, very few black swans will break you—or make you. The "trick," then, is to be more or less prepared for the unpreparable. E.g., Rudy Giuliani reacted well to a Black Swan of the highest-lowest order, 09/11, and his instinctive response to what cannot be prepared for may garner him the White House. At the very least, his response on 09/11 demonstrated how rapidly (hours!!) one can flip from "laughable nearly has-been" (lame-duck mayor booted out of Gracie Mansion by his cheated-on wife) to "king of the largest of hills."

Thinking of yesterday's blog post, "The right plan is to have no plan," I recall Henry Mintzberg's observation (The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, also mentioned yesterday): "Strategic plans work wonderfully ... when you don't need them, when tomorrow unfolds as a natural extension of today. They are useless, or even detrimental, when you do need them—in discontinuous times."

To dismiss the myth of continuity and acknowledge the absolute ubiquity of non-linearity, black swans and the like—i.e., their centrality on the scorecard of your life's record as parent, spouse, professional—means that you will never again look at the world the same way again.

100 Ways to Succeed #95:

NON-LINEARITY RULES.
NON-LINEARITY = LIFE.
IF SUCCESS [OR FAILURE] IS DETERMINED ALMOST ENTIRELY BY THE UNPREDICTABLE [LITERALLY], THEN WHAT?

"Most of our predictions are based on very linear thinking. That's why they will most likely be wrong."—Vinod Khosla

"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)

I have no tidy "tip" here, but rather an extraordinary plea that you implicitly put "non-linear" thinking atop your and your leadership team's agenda—permanently. This may mean hiring poets and astrologers and putting homeless folks on your advisory board. It may mean sabbaticals or yoga, sabbaticals and yoga. Or dropping out for a year or three. Or joining a rock band. Or putting 3-inch heels on one foot only. Though Rudy "dealt with a crisis" well—it's more than such a bland prescription. It's not "dealing well with crisis," though that may be part of it, but more along the lines of dealing constantly and comfortably and quite happily with "very strange stuff," or some such.

REMEMBER. REMEMBER. REMEMBER. YOUR LIFE'S TRAJECTORY WILL BE DETERMINED ALMOST ENTIRELY BY EVENTS WHICH BY DEFINITION CANNOT BE PLANNED FOR. ACT ACCORDINGLY. WHATEVER THAT MEANS.

The "Wall Street" Journal, Right?

I have no idea what Rupert Murdoch will do with the Journal. But I do know hilarity when I hear it. On the road to Boston (on the way to São Paulo) this morning, at about 5 a.m., I listened to some interviews with editors and writers at the Journal following the announcement of the decision to sell to Mr M. One editor, fit to be tied and clearly expecting the immediate end of the world as he's known it, summarized his chagrin and disgust: "It's all about money."

I just about ran off the road as I choked with laughter. It's not that I doubt that Murdoch will make ideological changes, nor do I expect to agree with some of those changes. No, my response, the life-endangering laughter, is tied, no more and no less, to the name of the beleaguered editor's paper per se. This is the WALL STREET journal. And, last I heard, Wall Street is precisely and by design "all about money." (Albeit aiming to produce economic well-being.)

The WSJ is ... and has been ... and doubtless always will be ... by definition ... all about money.

(My thanks to that discombobulated editor—anything that can produce a laugh at 5 a.m. is worth a salute.)

"The Right Plan Is to Have No Plan"

The above is the Gospel of No Gospel as pronounced by economist William Easterly in his masterly book, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

As I prepared for my recent Kenya trip and seminar, I "read in" as usual. One eye-popping article was an Easterly piece, "The Ideology of Development," in Foreign Policy magazine (July/August 2007). Easterly argues that "Development" is at least as dangerous an ideology as communism and fascism, which is quite an assertion. "Development," he writes, "promises a comprehensive final answer to all of society's problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and despotic rulers. It shares the common ideological characteristic of suggesting there is only one correct answer, and it tolerates little dissent." Easterly blasts, among others, the likes of Jeffrey Sachs and, indirectly, Bono.

The deal is this—and I am drawn to it because it mirrors exactly my own half-century journey and rant: Namely "planners," especially "master planners," more or less believe that the plan is the thing—and that the messy process of implementation on the ground will take care of itself if The Plan is "right." (Reminiscent of Iraq, eh?) In The White Man's Burden, Easterly describes "planners" and "searchers." While planners treat the plan as holy writ, searchers live by rapid trial and error and learn through constant experimentation and adjustment. To wit:

"In foreign aid, Planners announce good intentions but don't motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom. ... A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors; a Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions; a Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown."

For me, Easterly's book is a genuine "page-turner." As I said, it confirms a half century plus set of biases. My "ideology"—my only ideology—is unabashedly rapid fire trial and error. (Bob Waterman and I labeled this "a bias for action," our first of Eight Basics that were the centerpiece of In Search of Excellence. Our conclusion was that business's #1 problem was, "Too much talk, too little do." As the pace of change has accelerated, the problem has only gotten worse.)

I lay my biases out as best I can in Part Two ("Innovate. Or die.") of my Master presentation—which I am linking once again to this Post. A small sample therefrom:

"Some people look for things that went wrong and try to fix them. I look for things that went right, and try to build off them."—Bob Stone, head of Al Gore's surprisingly successful program to "re-invent government," which consisted of mostly low visibility, high impact experiments that Stone et al. spread via what we now call "viral marketing."

"Somewhere in your organization, groups of people are already doing things differently and better. To create lasting change, find these areas of positive deviance and fan the flames."—Richard Pascale & Jerry Sternin, "Your Company's Secret Change Agents," Harvard Business Review

"We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn't think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we're already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months."—Bloomberg by Bloomberg, Mike Bloomberg's business saga

William Easterly, Mike Bloomberg, and I pretty much agree, to quote Easterly: "The Right Plan Is to Have No Plan."

I urge you to try the book—it is indeed important, especially if we wish to see all the newfound attention to Africa actually lead to real progress. Like Easterly, I think we are mostly on the wrong path.

(My other "bible" for "all this" is Henry Mintzberg's The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning.)

(Speaking of Africa, and my recent trip there to, you'll see a blurry picture of a pissed-off leopard above—presumably you can figure out why it's blurry.)