Recession Thoughts: 44 Strategies

Tom's frequently asked to provide strategies for surviving and thriving in a great recession. He shares his suggestions in a new video from The Little BIG Things video series. You can find the video on the top of the right column here on the front page of tompeters.com, or by clicking here. The transcript is available as a pdf. If you'd like to see previously posted videos in the series, be sure to visit our Video page (direct link to TLBT video series).

One More Time.
Economics = Psychology.

Time (1130.09) devotes a column to financial market forecasting, in particular to the wisdom of Robert Prechter. Prechter is a man after my own heart. Psychology and sociology rather than "efficiencies" drive the market: "Prechter argues," says Time, "that standard economic models of financial markets depict prices as reflections ... of true value." But Prechter believes that "waves of social mood are the driving factor" of prices.

All I can add is: Amen!
Maybe even: Duh!

Hmmmm ...

There's no "Jack Welch" these days. No one heralded as God-among-CEOs. Partially, I'm sure, because business has a low lower lowest rep during the mega-recession. Jack was a byproduct of good times; the market mostly went up during his 20 years at the helm of GE.

But if there were to be a Jack Welch today ...

I'd consider voting for, or definitely would vote for, even ahead of Steve Jobs ... Cisco's John Chambers. He evaded the dot com IT bust. He's re-tooled his now very big company on several occasions. He's coming out of the recession aggressively. Etc. Etc.*

Funny, but I seldom see him singled out ...

(*And what's not to like about a Silicon Valley guy always caught by the camera wearing a super-sober suit?)

Some Unadulterated Good News for Americans!
Market Share That Matters!

Little is more important to America's long-term future than its true #1 "service industry"—research universities. There are rankings and rankings and rankings, and some are confusing as hell. Among the top 50, various polls give us, roughly, between 50% and 70%. (Add in the Europeans and Canada and the number is consistently at or above 90%.) In one poll, raw # of scientific papers, American universities took the top 24 slots. Given budget woes affecting the likes of the University of California, all of whose campuses are usually in the top 100, the situation is always precarious.

Thanksgiving 2009

In yesterday's post I offered up the epigraph from my forthcoming book, and my delight therewith. Namely:

"Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart."—Henry Clay

It strikes me that Mr. Clay's remark also works particularly well for a Thanksgiving post in the midst of, for many, a very tough year.

When I got back from my Angola-Saudi Arabia-Dubai-Ecuador-India-Etc. marathon, I tweeted about the fact that my greatest thrill (yes, thrill) was the Unmitigated Joy of the Ordinary: doing my laundry, chatting with neighbors at nearby Mach's Market, working through Susan's T'giving shopping list, and, yes, washing the dinner dishes (I don't use the dishwasher—I like the therapeutic part of hand washing).

I am not soft-peddling the loss of a job or a major reduction in hours or the like. Nonetheless, what we pretty much all do have is the opportunity to be thoughtful to others—to offer up "courtesies of a small and trivial character."

Add these kindred quotes to the "keeper" list:

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble."—Helen Keller

"We do no great things, only small things with great love."—Mother Teresa

So how about dedicating Thanksgiving 2009 to purposefully Practicing Courtesies of a Small and Trivial Character?

(I started out this Wednesday by sending "Happy Thanksgiving" emails of no more than a few lines in length to about 80 or 90 people.) (As usual, the responses are pretty amazing—so much so that it almost makes the drill feel self-serving.) (Speaking of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I just read that the pilgrim fathers and mothers preceded Thanksgiving by a fast day. I think that is a marvelous idea. Alas, I read the article after breakfast on Wednesday. But next year ...)

At any rate, Happy Thanksgiving. And, as always, my deepest gratitude to our soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines away from home, and in many cases in harm's way, on this November 26th.

The "Eight Courtesies"

The toughest part of writing a new book is choosing the epigraph—a dozen words penned by someone else that perfectly encapsulate what one has been up to for the prior five years. Well, I am entirely happy, even ecstatic, about the epigraph to The Little BIG Things*:

Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.—Henry Clay

In fact, I'm now making what I call "The 'Eight Courtesies'" the centerpiece of my presentations. Below you'll find the List of Eight. Also, I have included a fully annotated version of The Eight Courtesies PowerPoint. (And a shorter version, from shorter presentations, The Five Courtesies PowerPoint.)

The "Eight Courtesies"

1. Stay in touch. (MBWA.)


2. Invest in relationships. (Make friends. Obsess.)


3. Listen. (Respect. Learn. Student. PROFESSIONAL. Sustainable Competitive Advantage #1)


4. Ask. (Engage. Inspire. Consult. React.)


5. Thank. (Appreciate. Acknowledge.)


6. Network. ("Suck down." C(I)>C(E).)


7. Apologize. (Unequivocal. Rectify. Over-react. Forgive.)


8. Practice thoughtfulness. (Kindness is free. This is ... STRATEGIC.)

The "Five Courtesies"

1. Listen. (Respect. Learn. Student. PROFESSIONAL. Sustainable Competitive Advantage #1.)


2. Ask. (Engage. Inspire. Consult. React.)


3. Thank. (Appreciate. Acknowledge.)


4. Apologize. (Unequivocal. Rectify. Over-react. Forgive.)


5. Practice thoughtfulness. (Kindness is free. This is ... STRATEGIC.)

[*Tom's new book, The Little BIG Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence, is to appear in early 2010.—CM]

The Mess Will Save Us.
Eventually.

We tend to think of the jobs economy in terms of jobs lost at the likes of GM and jobs added at the likes of Google. And thinking in such a manner is misleading, and downright dangerous.

The fact is that the American economy in particular is an economy of churn—always adding and subtracting jobs at an incredible rate. Forbes (16 November) presents some stunning statistics:

Between September 2008 and September 2009 we lost about 6 million jobs. That's a crushing blow no matter how you look at it. But if you think that the likes of propping up staggering giants such as GM is the answer, think again.

Question: How do you (we!) arrive at a loss of 6 million jobs?

We added—yes, I said ADDED—51 million jobs.
And we lost 57 million jobs.

That is, bizarre as it may seem, in the space of a year there was a churn of over ONE HUNDRED MILLION jobs. (Micro-tizing the math, we didn't "lose a job"—on average, we created 8 jobs and lost 9 jobs for a net of minus 1—and repeated that musical chairs drill enough times to end up 6 million in the hole.)

And this is how it always goes, though typically, thank God, the pluses exceed the minuses.

While the above offers not a smidgeon of relief to jobless Jane or Joe next door, there is long-term good news imbedded in these stats. We are not in fact dependent on a jobs recovery at GM or Chrysler to get us back on our feet. We are dependent, over the long haul, on an out-of-work employee starting a Web-based business and through valiant effort creating three new jobs in the next 18 months. We are dependent on a nervy local electronics dealer stealing a page from Best Buy, and adding his own 3-person "Geek Squad." Etc. Etc.

The message of long-term relative American economic effectiveness is churn, or the "gales of creative destruction" as the economist Joseph Schumpeter put it. Put simply, we "do" churn, painful though the constant dislocations may be, better than anybody else—i.e., our labor markets are the least sticky outside the likes of India or China. I lived with astoundingly productive mega-churn for over three decades in Silicon Valley. It isn't pretty—but over the long haul it works, and works a helluva lot better than government-based bets on particular big companies.

There is a four-letter word for depending on big companies and incentives aimed at big companies to pull our irons out of the fire. Namely ... dumb.

(NB: I apparently coined the term "Brand You." And my pal and our Cool Friend Dan Pink gave us "Free Agent Nation." Never have these ideas been of such profound importance. The issue of Forbes cited above refers to a 2006 Government Accountability Office study that estimates that, hold onto your hat, 30 percent of all U.S. workers are free-lancers or part-timers who are not pocketed into any of the Bureau of Labor Statistics worker stats categories. Unreported annual income from the "informal" economy may be as high as $2.3 TRILLION.)

How Dare You!

Writing in the 23 November issue of Fortune, Geoff Colvin let slip a phrase that made me physically ill. Namely, "in the waning days of this recession ..."

How dare you!

Yes, it does look like Goldman's bonuses, and those of many or most of their I-bank pals, will rebound—perhaps to more than 100% of the pre-catastrophe levels. And, given their vaccination queue-jumping, we can expect that the Goldmanites will not have to miss Turkey Day because of the distraction of fever or swine flu aches and pains.

But there are "a few," perhaps unaware of the recession's "waning days," who, along with their families, are not approaching the holiday season with unmitigated self-satisfaction at the gains made since Turkey Day 2008.

Unemployment stats are awful.
And they will surely get worse.
The "jobs recovery" will doubtless take five years—or more.

Underemployment is widespread literally beyond measure.
There are hours cutbacks, in many or most cases severe.
And pay grade reductions.
And employment temporarily saved by accepting slots three or four steps down the ladder.

Expectations have been truncated.
Pensions have been severed, sometimes months from planned retirement.
House payments are in arrears.
Foreclosures still loom by the million.
Home equity, the mainstay of the American nest-egg, has evaporated, and will not fully rebound even in the next eight or ten years.

And on.
And on.
(And on.)

I agree that it appears that the crisis of potential total-system meltdown that loomed at the edge of Thanksgiving Week 2008 seems to have been evaded. And I, while clipping a clothespin to the end of my nose, was among those who saw the massive financial sector bailouts as an absolute necessity. In fact, overall, and despite the horrifying deficit run up, I believe that the policy makers deserve a solid "B" grade for efforts during the last 13 months.

Nonetheless, millions upon millions upon more millions of my fellow Americans will approach Thanksgiving and Christmas not only traumatized, but with little light at the end of the tunnel.

I wish them well.
And I offer them my humble prayers.

They surely do not need or deserve a self-appointed grandee at Fortune gleefully pontificating about the return of business as usual following our little rough patch.

How dare you, Mr. Colvin!

Leadership as a Sacred Trust

In the latest installment of The Little BIG Things video series, Tom describes leadership as a sacred trust. He says that the decision to lead is the decision to be responsible for the growth and development of your fellow human beings. You can find the video on the top of the right column here on the front page of tompeters.com, or by clicking here. If you'd like to see previously posted videos in the series, be sure to visit our Video page (direct link to TLBT video series).

My Heart (and Body) Are in San Francisco, God's Gift to City-hood!

I spoke at an Inc. magazine event last night in San Francisco, commemorating the winner of an entrepreneur-to-be contest with a hearty financial prize. Incidentally, in the name of Chinese ubiquity, much on our minds these days, the event is sponsored by the powerhouse Chinese B2B outfit—Alibaba.

In preparing, I put together a list of ten key factors that I believe characterize entrepreneurial excellence ...

Entrepreneurial Excellence TEN

1. "Insane" Passion for and commitment to the idea.
2. Can explain the idea in Simple English and Excite others about its Uniqueness in ONE MINUTE (or less).
3. Good Accountant/"Wise-man (-woman)"/50-50 Partner.
4. Devotee of the Experimental Method ("Try it. Now.")/Master of "Plan B"/Relentless/Resilient.
5. Patience in Hiring/"Great Place to Work" from the get-go.
6. "d"iversity/M-F balance.
7. Exude Decency-Character-Integrity.
8. Playfulness/Fun.
9. Sweat the details (Execution = Strategy).
10. EXCELLENCE. Period.

[For the PPT slides, you can use this link.]

Cool Friend #144:
Bob Waterman

If you're a fan of Tom's first book, In Search of Excellence, don't miss reading this interview with his coauthor, Bob Waterman. We're glad to add Bob as a Cool Friend, and we all enjoyed working on this interview. (Yes, he does share a few secrets about what went on during the writing of the book.) I think the most fascinating aspect is examining another path taken from the same jumping-off point. Bob was no less successful than Tom, just not as publicly. He describes to Erik how ISOE/In Search came to be and what he's been up to since then. Bob also talks about his involvement with the Restless Leg Syndrome Foundation. Funny, both Tom and Bob ended up vacationing in New Zealand, as you can see in the picture above. Divergent paths veered close again after more than 25 years. Welcome to the Cool Friends, Bob!

Excellence Slides: Press Ganey

Today, Tom met with about 2,000 health care senior execs, mostly from hospitals and hospital systems in National Harbor MD, right outside of Washington D.C., hosted by Press Ganey, researchers and consultants who provide solutions and resources to their clients to help them provide high quality health care. Press Ganey is significant because of their focus on this one industry. As their website states: "Health care is a unique industry in which success is not measured simply by financial returns. The most successful health care organizations act upon the needs of all customers [doctors, nurses, patients, administrators] to improve the delivery of care and achieve organizational results."

Slides are here: Excellence Always: The Art of the Possible, Press Ganey, Baltimore

Excellence Slides: Seminarium Ecuador

The slides I'm posting are for an event that took place last Wednesday. Tom's been all over the world and had Internet access, but the mountains of Ecuador proved too big an obstacle. We hope he enjoyed several days of being out of touch. In a scenic location. Sounds good to me.

The event was the Seminarium Ecuador in Quito, short for San Francisco de Quito, the capital city. Be sure to look at google maps, wikipedia, and other websites to learn more about this fascinating place. It's in the same time zone as Boston, but worlds away.

If you attended the Seminarium, please give us your comments, and if you'd like the slides they are here.

Link Roundup #9

Cool Friend Dan Coyle has a terrific post on failure.

On a recent Marketplace, Charles Handy advocated for becoming a Free Agent.

BusinessWeek's feature of ski company K2's design and innovation process teaches an important lesson on focusing on the user of your product. Hat tip to Cool Friend Matthew May.

The latest manifestos have been posted at ChangeThis. Our suggestion is to check out "The Upstarts Are Here!: What Can You Possibly Learn from Entrepreneurs in Their Twenties? Plenty" by Donna Fenn.

viagra canadian pfizer Cool Friend Andrea Learned predicts how current trends will change how we do business in "Bridging Gender, Consumer Behavior & Social Responsibility."

We enjoyed Ian Sanders' post "Five Big Lessons from Small Shop Keepers," not because he mentioned Tom, but because the five lessons are right on the money.

Tom spoke in Angola last month. Since we don't hear much from an African perspective on this blog, we thought you'd enjoy this blog post from someone who heard Tom speak at that event.

Out-Read the Other Guy

We continue our The Little BIG Things video series with "Out-Read the Other Guy." Tom reminds us that a key to success is reading. Staying informed and developing your analytical skills is essential. You can find the video on the top of the right column here on the front page. Let us know in the comments section what you're reading. And if you'd like to see previously posted videos in the series, be sure to visit our Video page (direct link to TLBT video series).

Veterans Day

[Our guest blogger is Abbey Bishop. Abbey is the Executive Director of Events for Tom but more importantly today, she is the wife of a soldier. Her husband, Keith, is currently deployed in Afghanistan and all of us at tompeters.com deeply appreciate the choice he has made to serve our country and anxiously await his safe return. We invited Abbey to share her thoughts on Veteran's Day and she graciously agreed. Thank you Abbey!]

Through the generations, how war is fought has changed so drastically. One thing that remains the same is what defines a Veteran. Courage, selflessness, and loyalty are a few very small words that barely begin to describe the incredible individual that offers so much to so many, expecting nothing in return. They believe in the ideal that the United States of America is greater than the individual and they are willing to—ultimately—give everything to uphold that ideal. Separation from family and friends, and to live inside a war zone are commitments they have made and stand by.

Ask yourself before just appreciating yet another federal holiday, would you be willing to do what they have done? Willing to miss the birth of your child, miss the burial of a family member, experience intermittent sleep for days on end, hope for at least one meal today, see a friend die with the fear that it could happen again tomorrow and the possibility of the sacrifice of your own life?

Saying thank you hardly seems good enough, but THANK YOU. Thank you to all the Veterans, past and present, who have protected my rights, my freedoms, those that I love and allow me to live the life of a free man. Never forget that the courage of those brave soldiers that have served in our armed forces allows life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Without our armed forces, these would not be certainties of our everyday life.

Today is a day of gratitude, but it is also a day of mourning. It is the very least we can offer to our countrymen who, without knowing us, stood up to protect us. Remember those that came home and those that couldn't. Veterans, my sincerest and most humble appreciation is yours. Thank you.

9 Questions To See If You Are Caring ENOUGH

[Our guest blogger is Cool Friend Rajesh Setty. Learn more about him at his site, his blog, or follow him on Twitter.]

Teddy Roosevelt said, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."

So, how do you know you are caring enough?

Do a self-assessment on your level of caring by thinking through these nine questions:

1. Are you REALLY listening when they are talking OR are you thinking about what you will say next?
2. Do you care for them OR do you care about their opinion of you? (Inspiration from the book Leadership and Self Deception by The Arbinger Institute]
3. Do you usually call them when you want something from them or when you think you can offer something of value to them?
4. Are they in your "network" or are you both in each other's "networks?"
5. Do you leave them impressed with you OR do you make them feel good about themselves?
6. What do you see when you see people? (From a quote submitted by Mike Wagner of White Rabbit Group)
7. If time is money, they are making an investment by spending their time (money) with you. How are you ensuring that they are getting the right return-on-investment for this interaction (ROII)?
8. Are you treating them the way you want them to treat you?
9. Are they REALLY better off because you are in their life?

Your turn now. What question should you ask yourself to see whether you are caring enough?

Excellence Always: San Francisco

On Friday, Tom was the closing speaker at the 2009 Urban Land Institute Fall Meeting and Urban Land Expo at Moscone Center in [glorious, matchless, delightful—TP] San Francisco. We'd love to hear from you if you happened to attend the event, and the PPT file is here.

New "Mini-MASTER"

I've been fooling around with a lot of formats for recent events in the likes of Luanda, Riyadh, Dhahran, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Toronto. I've also been folding some of the stuff in the new book into my presentations. For my own use, I created a 525-slide monster I titled "Mini-MASTER." Here it is, FYI.

King Fahd University

Tom's public seminar yesterday was hosted by King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals in Dhahran. "KFU is as good as it gets in its field," Tom reports. "I had a lovely time. I think we got some good work done—and had a lovely time along the way. As an engineer, I have great fun poking fun at my brethren." He adds, "If it gets any better than Saudi hospitality, I don't know where." (At Tom's request, spaces at the seminar were made available for "a couple of dozen students.")

As always, please let us hear from you, and you can get the PPT slides here.

The Little BIG Things Video Series

As mentioned previously, Tom's been busily working on a new book. The Little BIG Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence will be published early next year.

Our talented friends at Enterprise Media captured Tom's thoughts during an early draft stage of the book. The words in the book will have little resemblance to the words Tom uses in these videos, as there have been numerous draft revisions, but the concepts are the same.

Our new video feature can be found at the top right of the front page under the banner. The video series starts off with the topic of the recession, the first being "Recession Thoughts from Tom Peters—On Lending Officers and The World of Finance." Tom reminds us that the financial crisis was caused, essentially, by lending officers not remaining connected to the people to whom they were lending. Staying connected and seeing, smelling, and tasting where the action is are Little BIG Things.

Excellence Slides

Tom's on the road again, this time speaking to the International Conference on Administrative Development: Towards Excellence in Public Sector Performance, in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. If you attended the event which took place earlier today, please let us hear from you in the comments. If you would like to get the PPT slides, you can do so here:
Excellence Always, Riyadh
Riyadh, Long Version