Center for Women in Business

The Center for Women in Business at Bentley College is holding its inaugural event, Moving from Conversation to Action, tomorrow. Tom will be there to have a lunch discussion with founder and leader, Betsy Myers. The event will be webcast live, to join in, visit this link and click on Join Webcast. The most exciting part of this event is that it features organizations who are already working to intentionally advance women in the workforce. They'll be sharing best practices as well as the challenges involved. Hope you can listen in.

25 April: End Malaria Day

We add our voice to the effort to raise awareness of malaria, and, more importantly, its prevention. Malaria No More is an organization committed to ending malaria in Africa by 2015. You can go to their website to donate now. There's also a booklet titled End Malaria, available at amazon.com, from which Malaria No More gets $20 with every book purchase. See its promo at YouTube.

MOAP #10

The next installment of Tom's "Mother of All Presentations," or MOAP, is Part 10, available now at ExcellenceNow.com. You can download the PowerPoint version or a PDF. We'll be releasing a section every other week throughout 2012.

Part 10 brings us the third "H," in Tom's "15H Theory of Everything." This presentation, which sprouted from a habit of Starbuck's Howard Schultz, is also titled "You ARE Your Calendar."

Best of the Cool Friends
Tom Kelley

One of Tom's favorite topics is innovation, and you'd have a hard time finding a more expert person on the subject than Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO. His business is innovation, and we spoke to him twice, following publication of his first and second books. By reading his two interviews (links below) at tompeters.com, you get a very good overview of an innovative organization, and perhaps some tips on making your own organization more so. Best quote: "So part of the message of my book and the message from people like Tom [Peters] is that it's okay to act differently."

Tom Kelley Interview No. 1, following his first book, The Art of Innovation.

Tom Kelley Interview No. 2, following his second book, The Ten Faces of Innovation. Feedback from readers of the first book prompted him to write the second.

If you would like to learn more, we also have an interview with Tom Kelley's brother David Kelley, CEO of IDEO, who describes some of the history of that very cool innovation factory.

Off the Cuff #4

Our Off the Cuff video series is a direct response from Tom to your questions. This is the fourth video in the series, which poses a question from Keith Clark, "Where do you find your inspiration on your most difficult days?"

eBook News

Almost all of Tom's books are available as ebooks now. If there's a particular title you're looking for, you can check the Tom's Books page to find out how to get it. Our friends at New Word City have been very busy lately working on Tom's short form ebooks. Two new titles have recently been released, Excellence Now: Purpose and Really First Things First. Apple has also been kind enough to group all the short form ebooks in one location in the iBookstore on iTunes. An Excellence Now room, if you will. Check it out.

MOAP #9

The next installment of Tom's "Mother of All Presentations," or MOAP, Part 9, is available now at ExcellenceNow.com. You can download the PowerPoint version or a PDF. We'll be releasing a section every other week throughout 2012.

In Part 9, Tom presents lessons from two of his heroes, U.S. Grant and Horatio Nelson, to emphasize his message to leaders: keep moving, forward, relentlessly.

TLBT Video #75
Strategy: Personalization Is Important

Now available on YouTube, a new video in The Little BIG Things series. In this clip, Tom relates a personal experience to highlight his message—put a personal touch into any presentation to form that all-important connection with your audience, whether it be a roomful or a lone listener.

You can find the video in the right-hand column of this page or watch it at YouTube (time: 2 minutes 30 seconds). Or, get a PDF transcript of the video's content: Strategy: Personalization Is Important.

HCA Addendum

Attached is "Systems Have Their Place: SECOND Place." It is directly related to my remarks concerning the absolute necessity of "culture change" to address intractable hospital problems such as patient safety.

Herewith the paper's origin: This essay indirectly stems from the current American presidential primaries. Two candidates suggested that the Department of Defense's wasteful ways could be curbed by ordering the adoption of "6-sigma management." Having put in two years of Pentagon duty as a naval officer (1969-1970), I was struck by the hilarity of such a notion; I'd observed the "adoption" of miracle systems before in the DOD (PPBS/Program Planning and Budgeting System, the brainchild of SECDEF Robert McNamara), and watched their inevitable byproducts—more bureaucracy and more waste. Moreover, ideas like this, and the issues associated therewith, are near the heart of my last 35 years of professional work. Hence, with some outside urging, and with no political axe to grind on this score, I prepared this brief paper.

Download the PDF.

Hospital Corporation of America

Tom is speaking at the HCA 2012 CEO Summit. Hospital Corporation of America, with approximately 200,000 employees and 163 hospitals (plus miscellaneous other facilities, such as 109 freestanding surgery centers), delivers 5% of all inpatient care in the USA.

(The unanswered question is will he be his normal self, that is, brutal on the topic of patient safety? He does inform us that he will be "brutal" on one key topic: "Excellence in my hospital or franchised fast-food restaurant or distribution center or division imbedded in a monster outfit is a wholly discretionary choice, regardless of regulations or
legislation or even corporate policy. Some leaders produce continued excellence in the face of astounding pressure and ambiguity—there are absolutely no excuses if one chooses to accept less. Moreover, excellence is not a 'year-end goal, or some such. Excellence is your next conversation or meeting or even email. Excellence, pure and simple and in its entirety, is the next five minutes. Or not.")

HCA, Scottsdale, AZ, 2 April 2012