Quote of the Week/
The Emotional Gender

"The banking crisis was caused by doing what no society ever allows: Permitting young males to behave in an unregulated way. Anyone who studied neurobiology would have predicted disaster."—Sheelan Kolhatkar, "What If Women Ran Wall Street?" (New York magazine/03.29.10)

(Another wonderful part of this "turn-the-tables" story is that the men's principal failing is that they are ... too emotional. The women are calm and measured. This is not anecdotal; the evidence is overwhelming. So much for the flighty girls and just-the-facts boys mythology.)

Audio-Video Updates

New audio files! Tom read the whole of The Little BIG Things, and it's available from the usual sellers as an audiobook. But we're also giving you a chance to hear his reading by posting a section at a time on our book page. Today's section is titled "Opportunity." Don't miss it!

#12: Tough Times? Matchless Opportunity!
#13: Boring Is Beautiful! (Or at Least It Can Be.)
#14: "Old" Rules. (Yes, Even in the "Age of the Internet.")
#15: Build Green Now. (No Excuses!)
#16: Bottom Line in Bad Times: Obsess Over the Top Line.

And, the latest video is "Thoughts on Budget," in which Tom says that you shouldn't ignore budget, but how many memorable engineering projects can you name that didn't go over?

[Here's the video (time: 3 minutes, 4 seconds) and a transcript (PDF).]

BOLD

I really don't need to do this, but I will anyway.

I Tweeted this morning on over-testing in healthcare: Buy MRI/CAT scanner. Big bucks. Must amortize in piecework/pay-by-procedure medicine by ordering as many tests as possible. Leads to $1 trillion over-treatment price tag. Leads to at least 10,000 deaths.

You know what?
THAT REALLY PISSES ME OFF.
REALLY REALLY REALLY PISSES ME OFF.

I'm also pissed off that most companies don't cater to HUGE older folks market.
I'm also pissed off that most companies don't jerk their strategies around 178-degrees to serve the women's market.
(And put women in leadership roles accordingly.)
I'm pissed off that managers aren't assiduous in practicing MBWA.
I'm pissed off that managers are such shitty listeners.
I'm pissed off that managers say "thank you" so infrequently.

Bob Waterman, my In Search of Excellence coauthor once told, as I recall, BusinessWeek that, "Tom's not happy unless he's pissed off."

Probably true.

Yipee! The reviews of The Little BIG Things have been mostly very good. But those who don't like it invariably complain about too much stuff in BOLD print. I understand their point, and suppose it is sometimes distracting.

But I'm pissed off.
And pissed off requires ... BOLD.

Hey, it's not worth getting out of bed unless you are determined to alter some small corner of the world. That's a BOLD aspiration.

So, for better or for worse ... BOLD it will be.
Must be.

1Q10

Wednesday is the last day of the 1st quarter of the year.

Ye gads.
Feels as if the Christmas tree lights were just re-boxed.

Quarterly earnings reports are a big deal for public corps. Too big a deal, some say, because of their emphasis on short-term results.

Maybe it's my age showing, but I think 90 days is a long time.

If you made some serious personal or professional "resolutions" for 2010, and your progress is slim, well, 90 days is a looooong time. That is, you're pretty far behind the eight ball.

My point: I heartily urge you, in, at most, the next 10 days to issue a 1Q10 Results Report for Anne R. Smith, or Robert Edmonds or ...

I suggest that the report be Formal in all respects, and 2 pages or less in length (there can be Appendices). I suggest that it more or less cover:

• Progress, scored quantitatively, against key resolutions.
• Projects underway or completed and their score on a 1-10 "Wow Scale."* (*One
measure of "Wow": Odds that I'll be talking about this one 2 years from now.)
• Revised or new or discontinued resolutions for the year.
• Network development activities-plans-goals. (Be rigorous in your reporting.)
• Lifelong learning projects launched or completed. (Including coolest new area you're busy learning about right now.)
• Key steps for the 1st 2 weeks of the new quarter.
• Progress against a set of personal behavioral aspirations such as improvement at listening or showing appreciation or ...
• A 10-word summary of 2010 for you so far. ("Really demonstrating my project start-up skills."
• Overall "Grade" for the year to date.
• If you're a boss, specific successes at people development (answer in detail, no generalizations allowed—use Appendix.)

I suggest that this effort is worth a pretty decent investment in time.
And I suggest that you review it with a trusted advisor or two; otherwise it need not see the light of day.

[Some things have started but have a long way to go. Picture above, Spring in Tinmouth VT is a possibility but hardly around the corner yet!]

Tom's Been Talking

This past Friday Tom talked to several bloggers, so over the weekend a crop of interviews became available that we'd like to mention.

Anthony Iannarino at The Sales Blog posted his interview with Tom on Saturday and Sunday. You can read it here: Part One (27 March 2010), and Part Two (28 March 2010).

At Wall Street Journal online (subscription required), Alexandra Levit did an interview titled "Grandma Was Right." (She was referring to age-old wisdom in The Little BIG Things.)

Finally, Ron Holohan at pm411.org asked Tom his opinion of the Toyota recall news. You can find that interview in text and audio here, and soon it will be available at iTunes. We'll add a link when it's done. [March 31 addendum: Link to iTunes.]

We've been linking reviews of The Little BIG Things on our book page and on our media page—you might want to take a look. We appreciate all the great feedback, especially from our Cool Friends.

My Socialist Day

I think of my self as a free-markets fanatic. I've earned my keep on that score, through everything including testimony to Congress. Hey, I was even asked to contribute a blurb to a collection of F.A. Hayek readings from the U. Chicago press.

Nonetheless ...

I started my day, you'll be glad to hear, with a clean T-shirt. Made in China, of course, but odds are, made in China from highly subsidized cotton grown in Texas. Milk on my cereal this morning, rather inexpensive, courtesy the New England Dairy Compact. Off to the country store to get papers—traveling on a tax-subsidized road. Waved to neighbor's children waiting for a subsidized bus heading to a subsidized school. Whoops, forgot, was online at dawn's early light; most of the tools I used, microchips, Internet, etc., were to a significant degree products of Department of Defense-funded R&D.

If my sore throat doesn't get better, off to the doc's. More subsidized roads, and when I get to the office, out comes my Medicare card. Several testing devices will doubtless have been covered in part by subsidies of some sort.

And so on.
And on.

So I will go on preaching self-sufficiency, free markets, unfettered entrepreneurialism, and the like. But every now and then I reserve the right to laugh at myself for thinking that I'm a self-reliant person.

The Grameen Lesson?

When Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus began his micro-lending efforts at Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, he had no preference as to whether loans went to men or women. To make a long story very short, male recipients often frittered the money away (alas, drank it away in many instances), while women overwhelmingly devoted their loan proceeds to their business, their family, and their community. As a result, through trial and error, Grameen has ended up with over 90% female recipients. (This is all the more startling given that Bangladesh is a Muslim country.) (And the story has been repeated, pretty much chapter and verse, elsewhere by Grameen and others.) (In the NGO aid-dispensing business, it's a given that getting the local women's network on your side is a 100.00% necessity.)

All this got me thinking about the controversial new healthcare bill. Women pretty much everywhere are the principal decision makers in family affairs. And, among other things, they make upwards of 80% of family healthcare decisions. (Actually about 90%, but I'm being conservative.) Moreover, the old saying goes, as you get older you had better hope that you had a daughter; when it comes to old-parent affairs, "boys" are notoriously, uh, not "girls." (I've observed this numerous times; and I am stepfather to two boys; and I am non-young.)

Oddly, most of the polls on the healthcare legislation were not divided by gender. But the two readings I did get, courtesy Newsweek and Princeton Research Associates, did not surprise me. In short, women were 12% more favorable in one case and 20% more favorable in the other (in the latter, women were +14%, men –6%). Also, alas, it doesn't take a genius to recognize that most of the intemperate public remarks came forth from the mouths of males. (The most memorable women's quote on the House floor, to my mind, went more or less, "With this bill, being a woman will no longer be a 'pre-existing condition.'" Insurers in several states, nine as I recall, tag spousal abuse as a pre-existing condition.)

There is honestly no "bottom line" to this post; but as I have been vociferously championing women's issues (women as underserved market opportunity #1, women in leadership positions in greater numbers to match market power) for about 15 years (pretty much the only "guru" to do so), I simply wanted to see how it played out in healthcare legislation.

(NB: God knows, I'm not claiming that men don't care about their families. I am suggesting that men are less likely, far less likely, to be decision-makers concerning family issues.) (In the Grameen case, it's, of course, a little more extreme than that.)

Strategies: Diversity Wins

In the latest addition to the video series, Tom reports that mixed-bag groups do better work than those made up of experts.

You can watch the video (2 minutes, 55 seconds) or download a transcript: Diversity Wins.

Cool Friend #146: Bill Warner

Our new Cool Friend Bill Warner was about age 20 when he started his first company. Twelve years later, in 1987, he founded Avid Technology, a company that went on to win an Emmy and an Oscar®—the Oscar being for transforming the editing process in film-making! Currently Bill is working with nonprofits including FutureBoston and Move With Freedom, guiding start-up companies, and working to transform the high-tech scene in Massachusetts. He has acted as an angel investor for eight start-ups and for three nonprofits. Read the interview to learn Bill's thoughts on how intention leads to invention, the difference between intention and vision, and how to keep "your" people happy. There's no book as yet, but we hope there will be soon.

Life's Work!
Help!

What do managers do for a living?
Help!
Right?

How many of us could call ourselves "professional helpers," meaning that we have studied, like a professional mastering her craft, "helping"?

Not many, I'd judge.

I've got the solution!
Or, rather, Edgar Schein, emeritus Professor of Management at MIT, does.

Ed has been a pioneer in organization and personal change. At it since the 1950s. And now he's written his summa, a 157-page book titled Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help. Based on tested theory, it is very readable. And practical.

The last chapter consists of "tips" and 7 "principles." E.g.:

"PRINCIPLE 2: Effective Help Occurs When the Helping Relationship Is Perceived to Be Equitable.
"PRINCIPLE 4: Everything You Say or Do Is an Intervention that Determines the Future of the Relationship.
"PRINCIPLE 5: Effective Helping Begins with Pure Inquiry.
"PRINCIPLE 6: It Is the Client Who Owns the Problem."*

*TP: Love the idea that the employee is a Client!! (Words matter!!)

Employee as Client!
"Helping" is what we [leaders] "do" for a living.
STUDY/PRACTICE "helping" as you would neurosurgery.
("Helping" is your neurosurgery!)

Little BIG Things
Ways to Pursue Excellence #165: Boss as "Helper."

Bosses exist to "help."
Period.

Check your calendar.
Right now.

What have been your EXPLICIT "helping" activities today?

Little BIG Things
Ways to Pursue Excellence #166: Employee as "Client."

Your employees are your "Clients."
Duh!

Use the word!

Little BIG Things
Ways to Pursue Excellence #167: Become a Student of "Helping." Become a "Professional" Helper.

"Helping" is NOT (!!!) a "seat of the pants" activity.
Study it.
Practice it.
Master it.

Audio Files Added

Today we've added three more items read by Tom to the audio section of The Little BIG Things page:

#9 That Which Goeth Up and Up and Up Doth Not Goeth Up and More Up Forever and Ever
#10 Good Things (Especially in Bad Times?) Come in Threes
#11 Get China on Your Mind! Get India on Your Mind!

Enjoy!

It's All About the Friendships!

I'd love to have a blurb from Bill Clinton. Lee Child does. "I love Jack Reacher."—Bill Clinton. I'm a Child-Reacher fan. Was reading The Enemy on the way home from Costa Rica. Came across this:

"Nearly a million men in the army, hundreds of billions of dollars, and it all came down to who liked who. Hey, what can you do?"

What can you do?

Nothing!

(It's the way things are.)

Everything!

(You can acknowledge reality—and attempt to make it your ally.)

In the case under consideration, there's a terrible conspiracy afoot. But forget that. The bigger fact is that while skill, etc., counts, in the end it is (more or less) all about the friendships.

(Not quite as awful—to some—as it sounds. At any given level, say, the skills are probably pretty equal, so the question is, What's the differentiator?)

All this is a dull and boring reminder that regardless of stakes or subject matter it's the collecting of allies and the maintenance and nurturing of supporters that determines whether or not things you care about get done.

So:

Check your lunch schedule this week, check your calendar. Think R.O.I.R.—Return On Investment in Relationships. What's your "investment plan" for the week?

Priscilla!
(Priscilla-ism!)

Susan and I and four close friends just returned from a week-long tramp among rainforests, cloudforests, etc., in amazing Costa Rica. Birds! Plants! Animals! (Even I can out-race a three-toed sloth.) Our guide! The families who made lunches for us and invited us into their homes! Market day in San Jose! Rice and beans! Beans and rice! All fabulous!

And years from now I'll mostly remember ... Priscilla!

Priscilla was our driver.
Ha!
Priscilla was our Mom!
Priscilla was a brilliant driver on truly awful roads in CR's booniest of boondocks.
Priscilla ranks in the Top 10 in the "God's best smile" category.
Priscilla figured out after half a day that a Diet Coke and I should not ever be far apart.
(There was ALWAYS a Diet Coke waiting for me.)
(WHERE THE HELL DID SHE GET THE DIET COKES?)
I had trouble on several occasions.
(It was VERY hot and VERY VERY humid.)
(I hate heat.)
(I really hate humidity.)
Priscilla always had a folding chair placed in the shade exactly when I needed it when I got back from the trail.
(Such chairs appeared mystically at exactly the right moment.)
I sweat like a demon; when I changed T-shirts (often) she always hung the wet one up—and once she even somehow found a dryer while we were out on a couple hour walk, and the last shirt was dried and ready when I'd soaked through my backup.
(That's insane.)
(That's true.)
(That's Priscilla.)
Priscilla has the cutest Grandkids you could imagine.
(We saw the pics, not the kids. Alas.)
Priscilla did the same for all six of us.
Priscilla has the best attitude of the 6,000,000,000+ people on earth.
(And that's a guarantee.)
(And Priscilla has been doing this for 20 years without letup.)
(And some groups are good.)
(And some groups are bad.)
(And some groups are very bad.)
(I hope we were pretty good, though I have no way of knowing.)

Does your organization have a Priscilla?
Several Priscillas?
Do you look for "Priscilla-ism" in virtually all employees, especially those with customer contact?
Do you understand that the "bottom" of the organization is really the "top" of the organization when it comes to details of execution and perception of "We-care-ism"?

(Our guide, Jimmy, was only a hair's breadth behind Priscilla. Priscilla and Jimmy were more important to the "Costa Rica trip" than Costa Rica was!)

(Read an interview yesterday in the New York Times with Kip Tindell, the CEO of the Container Store. He gets this Big Time. That's why a boring retailer was the #1 "best company to work for," per Fortune, a couple of years ago.)

Little BIG Things
Ways to Pursue Excellence #164: Priscilla-ism.

Understand the Power of Priscilla-ism.
Accept no less than Priscillas in any customer-facing job.
Follow the Container Store axiom and do not compromise on Priscilla-ism.

Implement.
Now.

Innovation Equality Video

The video series continues with this short (1 minute, 37 seconds) spot about Innovation Equality. Watch the video on YouTube to find out what Tom means by that. You can also see other videos in the series by going to this page of our website and choosing from the list of titles.

[If you'd like a transcript in PDF form, we provide it here: Innovation Equality.]

Audio Addition

Today we posted four more items in the audio section of The Little BIG Things page of our website. The four book pieces read by Tom make up the second section of the book, titled "Excellence":

#5 If Not Excellence, What? If Not Excellence Now, When?
#6 Whither Excellence? Or: Asleep at the Wheel.
#7 "Quality": You'll Know It When You See It.
#8 Excellence Is ...

You can hear Tom by clicking on the titles above, or go to the audio player on the book page to see the list of audio selections.

TLBT: Online Interview

It's not easy to get Tom and an interviewer in the same place, so David Meerman Scott made a video of himself asking questions, and we made a video of Tom giving answers. Apply a little digital sleight-of-hand, and voilà! We present an interview between David and Tom. Also, David gives a good intro to the conversation on his blog, where he lists parts of the video you might want to seek out. Thanks to David for his effort!

Link Roundup #14

There are a few books by Cool Friends:
Jason Fried has written Rework with David Heinemeier Hansson, his co-founder at 37signals. The back of the book states, in part, that "planning is guessing," and "inspiration is perishable."

Dan Heath and his brother Chip wrote Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard. They explain how the chances of sustaining change are increased if both sides of the brain are satisfied ... the emotional side as well as the logical side.

Richard A D'Aveni is a friend who hasn't yet become a Cool Friend. In Beating the Commodity Trap, D'Aveni points out that commoditization can happen to any business or product, even the most iconic.

Cool Friend Sylvia Ann Hewlett has an article on Bloomberg.com by way of HarvardBusiness.org, "Why Women Are the Biggest Emerging Market." We appreciate her adding her voice to Tom's.

Then there are a couple of quirky messages we got in the emails:
In response to Tom's video about First-line Supervisors, Marko Gregori directed questions to Tom about managing negative talk if you're working on a good product under a bad boss. Marko ended up by posting a blog asking for input, and you might help him out by contributing some thoughts on the subject.

Finally, Shed Simove, a creative consultant whose memoir is titled Ideas Man is offering ideas for bid on eBay. Please don't take this as a recommendation or advertisement. We enjoy putting some unusual web links in front of you. You can judge them for yourselves, and I'm sure, let us know if they're of interest or way off base.

Audio Update #2

The Little BIG Things is now available as an audio download through Amazon.com (although the link points you to Audible.com since Amazon now owns Audible). And as Erik mentioned, you can find it at iTunes. One fan alerted us that if you try to search by Tom Peters at iTunes (and some booksellers), you may have trouble finding The Little BIG Things as the author listed is Thomas J. Peters or Thomas Peters (who knew that search wasn't smart enough to do that yet?). We recommend searching by the book title.

Strategy: Be Extraordinary

The video series continues with Tom describing a meeting with Barry Gibbons, former chief of Burger King. Asked to speak to the collected BK managers, Tom sparks Barry's realization that anything is better than being ordinary.

You can watch the video (time: 3 minutes, 5 seconds).

Or get a PDF of the video transcript: Strategy: Be Extraordinary.

Listen Up! (Audio update)

The Little BIG Things is available as an audio download. At iTunes ($26.95), from Audible.com ($30.61/$7.49 [promo]), and other places we haven't tracked down yet.

Oh, and we're going to put audio files up at tompeters.com. One section a week or so. (There are roughly 40 sections in the book.) The four 'Ways' in the first section are up now.

Happy Publication Day!

We have a book! The Little BIG Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence. It's for sale in stores! It's for sale online! We're excited! We're happy! We're relieved. Many many thanks to Cathy Mosca, Shelley Dolley, Joy Stauber, Richard Weaver, Mike Slind, Sarah Rainone, all the folks at HarperStudio, Abbey Bishop, Shannon Waite, Charlie Macomber, Su (at House of Pretty), the community at tompeters.com, and countless others (check out the Acknowledgments on p. 511). And, of course, thanks to Tom for writing the book.

Frequent commenter MarkJF is hankering for an autographed book, and we're sure he's not alone. Since we no longer sell books at this site, Tom has signed a number of book plates. Send an email to tom@tompeters.com with your mailing address and we'll send you one to put in your own copy of The Little BIG Things.

Tom did record an audio version as well. It won't be available on CDs but will be a download. Not abridged. He read the whole book. We'll keep you posted on that.

Seth Godin added The Little BIG Things to his latest off-the-wall book list.

Our Cool Friend Chris Brogan reviews! it! here!

More info on our own The Little BIG Things page.

The Financial Times Weighs In

We thought you might enjoy reading an early review of The Little BIG Things by Stefan Stern, management writer for the Financial Times (sorry, registration required). Turns out, he liked it. And he penned one of my favorite descriptions of Tom: "[T]his 'wizard of wow!', this 'emperor of excellence' wins you over with his irrepressible energy and verve."

Strategies: First-line Supervisors, the Video

On 24 February Tom gave us his "First-line Manager20/1LM20" and declared the choice and nurturing of first-line supervisors a Peerless Strategic Opportunity. In this video, Tom explains why choosing first-line supervisors is among the most important decisions a business can make.

You can watch the video on YouTube (time:
2 minutes, 38 seconds) or download a PDF transcript.

Leadership Quality

[Richard King, Managing Partner of Tom Peters Company, UK, has this commentary on the BloombergBW/Hay Group study we included in Link Roundup #13 last week.]

Commenting on their recently published study of the Best Companies for Leadership, Hay Group's John Larrere said, "Rapid changes in the world are impacting how organizations do business, and as a result, the old rules of how organizations select, develop and retain good leaders have been turned upside down causing the future of leadership to look very different. ... It's about getting them (people) to be passionate about their work and grooming them to handle the challenges ahead."

These findings fall in line with those of leadership researchers Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner who highlight "Inspiring" and "Forward Looking" as two of the four key leadership characteristics people look for in leaders they would chose to follow (see their book Credibility). But here's a twist, Credibility was published in 1993. So ... some might argue that it's not particularly earth-shattering news that "The Best Companies for Leadership" have now worked this out!

But I think there are more important characteristics to building contemporary leadership effectiveness. For example, Kouzes and Posner's classic research highlighted "Honest" and "Competent" as the other two characteristics people predominantly look for in leaders. I wonder whether these Top 20 Best Companies in the Hay study have figured out how to select, build, and maintain people's belief that they are being honestly and competently led in today's unpredictable business world? Or are we all now so bashed about and cynical that these latter characteristics no longer matter as much?