The White House website
American Red Cross
Partners in Health
Soles4Souls)

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.

How would you like to spend a day working with the world's most influential management & leadership authorities on your key business challenges? The Art of ... events is excited to offer you the opportunity to do just that. Tom Peters' & Marcus Buckingham's ground-breaking concepts have transformed management strategies and leadership practices around the world. Together with David Allen [Getting Things Done] & Mitch Joel [Six Pixels of Separation], they will lead 1,200 managers and leaders in an intensive and interactive seminar on how to go about implementing these practices.

To read more—and more eloquent—encomiums, see the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. If you find anything else that gives good insight into Ted Kennedy, please drop a link into the comments.

To quote Tom from an April, 2006 blog post:

I got so damn sick of "excellence," so worn out by "excellence" ... for years after "the book" became a hit. Distanced myself from it. Ran from it.

But no longer. Excellence is back in a big way. If you've looked at any of Tom's slide presentations lately, you'll see that the first slide always includes: "Excellence. Always."

When Joy began to think about Excellence (which hereafter will always be capitalized at this site) and images for a banner, she thought about the wheel, and when she thinks wheels, she thinks bikes. (As a fan of bicycles myself, I’m glad that the banner begins with a bike in motion.) Joy discovered the black and white spiral while exploring the Golden Mean, also known as the Golden Ratio, and she liked the energy of it. (Cathy's concern: "When you scroll down our front page, the black spiral seems to pulse in and out. I hope we don't cause any seizures.") Yes, we all here at tompeters.com hope we don't cause any seizures, either, unless you’re seized by an urge to sit bolt upright and realize that you can begin right now to always be Excellent.

Flowers are Excellent, of course, but especially this flamboyant one. (No meek and mild-mannered flowers here.) (Recall also that Tom suggests not cutting back on your flower budget even during this recession.) And what could be more Excellent than fresh-grown garden tomatoes? From the earth, pictured next. As for the star, isn't Excellent work always rewarded with a star? (Maybe not in real life, but certainly in school. But maybe real-life Excellence should be rewarded with stars, too?)

Joy likes to include a silhouetted character in her banners. You may or may not think it's Tom, flying a kite. (His hair has never been that long in our recollection.) Think Ben Franklin and the discovery of electricity, think wind power. The words in the speech balloon clearly are Tom's, part of his new clarion call, "If not EXCELLENCE, WHAT? If not EXCELLENCE now, WHEN? " After that, we move on to the sunset, our Excellent reward at the end of each day.

That's the lowdown behind the new Summer/Excellence banner.

With that, we here wish all of you a wonderful, warm, relaxing, and Excellent summer. (As always to our friends in the southern hemisphere, best wishes for an Excellent winter.)

[My favorite Kemp memory. I was on the Farm in Vermont—not my primary residence at the time. And the phone rang at dinnertime. This booming voice was on the other end. (Kemp could sound face to face, or on the phone, like the Bills quarterback he once was, barking signals in front of 50,000 people.) "Peters, damn it, you're harder to get hold of than George Bush (JK was Mr Bush I's HUD secretary at the time). I need you to get your butt down to D.C. ..." Needless to say, I scurried to Washington a couple of days later for some meeting or other on the Hill with Pals of Jack.]

Following a rule I generally break, what follows is the first 800 words, with a continuation which you may choose to peruse. We also have a PDF version of the entire 7,000-word piece.

[Please keep in mind that the text is a draft, which Tom urged me to remind you. Changes, as always, are to come.—CM]

Preface to 2009 Edition: Re-imagine!

Does any of what follows, in a book published in 2003, make sense if, or as, the world is falling apart? That's the obvious, and only, way to start a foreword in early 2009. The answer, of course, is "Yes"—and "no."

Re-imagine describes a brave new intertwined world of commerce, organizational formats, and career strategies in which many or even most of the old rules have been broken, then shredded. While the economic system is dramatically altered in 2009, and will surely be altered more in 2010 and perhaps beyond, the old rules that were broken that animated Re-imagine in the first place are still broken; much of the work to be done in 2009, beyond dealing with day-to-day survival issues, comes from the work list we laid out in 2003—there is far more unfinished than finished business when it comes to readiness for unrelenting, global, speed-of-light 21st century marketplace competition.

Boundaries are disappearing—and, altered circumstances or not, neo-protectionism or not, we live in a global village; mind-blowing new technologies are announced, it seems, by the day, from Apple's latest to the consequences of full-blown genetic mapping, and new members of the Vital Economy Club only enhance that reality. Most any task can be done anywhere. Alliances of every imaginable flavor are created, do their thing, and evaporate. Radical tools such as "crowdsourcing" change dynamics of work and human communication that are thousands of years old—and such tools continue, regardless of macro-economic circumstances, to arrive on the scene and grow like Topsy with startling regularity. And hence the race to add value to keep one's job, or to keep lots of jobs at home, or to enable a going concern, even a small one, to survive has only intensified.

Hierarchies are dying, at least in larger firms; and the economic situation accelerates that—lard in the superstructure is first on the chopping block, and not just at GM and Citi. We do most of our work via project teams that involve members from hither, thither and yon; and that last a year—or a week. Order shouting is out. These disparate team members from disparate places asked to concoct new stuff based on combining ideas of every description can only be motivated by persuasion and passion and the promise of personal growth, not the rattling of the hierarchical saber. "Who's in charge" varies by the day; Cisco Systems, the communication equipment giant, weathering the current storm by reinventing itself once again, calls it an organization based on "emergent leadership"—the de facto leader of a critical team can emerge electronically in a literal flash from three levels down in the organization, by dint of her stellar electronic contributions made from a cramped cubicle or her bedroom at home at 3 a.m.

Those of us in the high wage nations, economic uncertainty, even chaos, notwithstanding, will only survive by moving up the same "value-added" ladder described in the 2003 edition of this book—and by being prepared, as specified in 2003, for more or less constant reinvention. The rise of the likes of China and India and Brazil proceeds apace—and even with current hiccups, or the flu, the pace of these new major players' growth is nothing short of astounding—and will be more so if your time horizon moves out to, say, 15 years, a fact for readers under 40 or so. Yesterday is over is the ultimate truism, but at the moment more true, if possible, than at any time in the last 100 years.

There is a finance tsunami.
There is a generic economics tsunami.
There is a technology tsunami, just gathering a head of steam.
There is a geo-political tsunami, just gathering a head of steam.
There is a work-structuring tsunami.
There is an organization effectiveness tsunami.
There is a careers tsunami.

And they play out differently and in different combination every day.

So does this brief recitation of forces at work now, most of which were at work then, suggest that "I wouldn't change a word"?

Of course not!
I'd change a lot.
But probably in a direction you'd not expect.

Oddly, I'd look back, not forward, mostly, if I made major modifications. As on Wall Street, I'd pay attention, lots more attention, to the bedrock.
In fact, I beat myself up daily for not having done so before.
(Frankly, I'm irritated with anyone who isn't beating themselves up.)
Oddly on yet another dimension, my re-assessment began a year or so before the fissures in the financial system's under-structure began to be visible.
I can even put an exact date on the start of my re-assessment.

April 14, 2006.

There were some very modest signs of Winter reluctantly giving way to Spring at home in Vermont. But my view that April 14th was 100% ice and snow as Air Siberia approached Novosibirsk, Siberia.

Continued reading Forewo/ard, March!...

Posted by Tom Peters |

Sixty-six years and 74 days, and I have never been so proud to be an American.
Anything is possible.
Still.
Godspeed, Mr. Obama.
Now the work begins.

I am shaken by the three near-misses, as any sane person would be, but will not curtail my International travels in any way. (Give me a couple of weeks re Mumbai, please.) I am a keen believer in the immense benefits of globalization and a charter member of the flat-earth society, circa 2008. It is my pleasure to be of some tiny service to my friends from Kuwait, Saudi, Dubai (week before last), to Kiev, to my beloved South Africa (may Mr Mandela live to 100+), Ukraine, Romania, etc. And India! Re the latter, I am "one of those"—a true blue India lover!

(As a matter of professional interest, I'd suggest Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century. I had just started it; it's a tough slog, but truly an original work.)

N.B. Tom's Lunch with the FT is now available. (Thanks, Bruce, for the heads up.)