"Brand Yous—as I see them—are out to Change the World." Tom Peters

Go to Garrison Keillor's Cool Friends interview

On a trip away from Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor took time to talk to us at tompeters.com. He and Erik had a great conversation about his latest book, A Christmas Blizzard, and many other topics, including a note from Julie Christie. We know you'll enjoy reading his Cool Friends interview.

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dispatches from the new world of work

Merry Christmas ...

... from Tom and all the rest of us at tompeters.com.

Cathy Mosca posted this on 12/25, in General.
Permalink | Comments (8) |

Business Book(s) of the Year

There were a ton of books on the financial crisis, many of which were quite good. My favorite came from the Financial Times' prize-winning reporter–editorialist Gillian Tett. Namely: Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe. (Hats off to the FT in general for reporting on the crisis—my FT "take" beats my Wall Street Journal take 4 days out of every 5.) (Ms. Tett notwithstanding, I believe the best way to get your reading head around the current mess is to read Michael Lewis's 1989 classic, Liar's Poker.)

As to best book by a "finance guy," it's no contest! The gold to Vanguard Mutual Fund Group founder John Bogle for Enough. The chapter titles tell the story. Here's a sample:

"Too Much Cost, Not Enough Value"
"Too Much Speculation, Not Enough Investment"
"Too Much Complexity, Not Enough Simplicity"
"Too Much Counting, Not Enough Trust"
"Too Much Business Conduct, Not Enough Professional Conduct"
"Too Much Salesmanship, Not Enough Stewardship"
"Too Much Focus on Things, Not Enough Focus on Commitment"
"Too Many Twenty-first Century Values, Not Enough Eighteenth-Century Values"
"Too Much 'Success,' Not Enough Character"

As to the overarching theme of the book, Mr. Bogle begins with this vignette: "At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, 'Yes, but I have something he will never have ...
enough.'"

My "best management book" award goes to my old pal (pal = full disclosure) and Fast Company co-founder Alan Webber for Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Yourself. From the beginning ("Rule #1: When the going gets tough, the tough relax") to the middle ("Rule #26: The soft stuff is the hard stuff") to the end ("Rule #52: Stay alert! There are teachers everywhere"), Alan doesn't miss a single beat in 52 tries. My runner-up, by a heartbeat, in the management book category is The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It, by Christine Pearson and Christine Porath. Decent behavior pays off, big time, and never more than in tough times—this is not a "be good" book, it's a "make money" book.

Now, to the Grand Prize Winner, my "Best Business Book 2009." The Gold goes with delight to retail guru George Whalin for Retail Superstars: Inside the 25 Best Independent Stores in America. Mr. Whalin is our tour guide to Excellence, and his first stop is, naturally, Fairfield, Ohio, home to Jungle Jim's International Market. The adventure in "shoppertainment," as Jungle Jim's calls it, begins in the parking lot and goes on to 1,600 cheeses and, yes, 1,400 varieties of hot sauce—not to mention 12,000 wines priced from $8 to $8,000 a bottle; all this is brought to you by 4,000 vendors from around the world. Like virtually all the stores in this book, customers flock to the doors from every corner of the globe. Then there's Abt Electronics in Chicago, Zabar's in Manhattan, and Bronner's Christmas Wonderland in Frakenmuth, Michigan—a town of just 5,000. Bronner's 98,000-square-foot "shop" features the likes of 6,000 Christmas ornaments, 50,000 trims, and anything else you can name if it pertains to Christmas.

And: The Ron Jon Surf Shop in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
And: Junkman's Daughter in Atlanta.
And: Smoky Mountain Knife Works in Sevierville, Tennessee.
And: the grand finale, finishing where we started—in Ohio; This time the spotlight is on Hartville Hardware in Hartville OH.

George Whalin's winning stores demonstrate–prove so many (heartening) things:

You can create a worldwide attraction and thrive as an independent in the Age of the Big Box retailer!
You can do anything!
You can be from anywhere!
You can make any-damn-thing ... bizarrely-amazingly-stupendously-special!

I think Whalin's message is perfect for 2009. We will, over the long haul, rebound from our colossal economic and unemployment mess on the backs of our entrepreneurs. The big guys may re-stock their payrolls a bit, but the generals, GE and GM, ain't the answer. And among the entrepreneurs, only a few, statistically, will be from Silicon Valley. To be sure, the best of the sexy entrepreneurs spawn whole new industries, but the blocking and tackling when it comes to jobs and productivity will come from Sevierville TN and Fairfield and Hartville OH and Frankenmuth MI and a hundred hundred other towns and small cities whose names, mostly, you haven't heard of.

When I initially blogged about Retail Superstars, I said, "I guarantee that any reader—from anywhere, in any business—can learn something from this book." I believe that. And because of that, Mr. Whalin takes home the Gold. (FYI: A great companion to Retail Superstars is Bo Burlingham's 2005 Small Giants: Companies that Choose to be Great Instead of Big.)

And so it goes ...

Tom Peters posted this on 12/22, in Excellence, What Tom's Reading.
Permalink | Comments (3) |

Practice

A commenter named Norman Wei recently asked Cathy if Tom rehearsed repeatedly before getting in front of the camera for one of his videos. We were pretty sure we knew the answer, but checked with Tom. Here's what he said:

"There's less of an easy answer than you'd imagine. I do not rehearse in the formal sense. On the other hand, I come close to staying up all night before a speech going over my slides—over and over and over. Perhaps over 100 times???? Of course I formally modify the slides, to the point of de-emphasizing one word and emphasizing (italics) another. But as I go through the slides I am also sub-consciously, semi-consciously going through phrasing I might use. So in a way it's damn near rehearsal, though you're also right in that the main rehearsal is 3,000 or so speeches over about 31 years."

Shelley Dolley posted this on 12/22, in Brand You, Execution.
Permalink | Comments (3) |

Link Roundup #10

On NPR's Marketplace, Cool Friend Rosabeth Moss Kanter talks about Peter Drucker's principles, starting with "First was the importance of a company having a sense of mission or a purpose."

Tom pointed us to this article in the Wall Street Journal, "Temporary Workers and the 21st Century Economy," by Jody Greenstone Miller. It foresees a world where most people have several part-time jobs rather than one for 40 (plus) hours every week. A new book to appear in the U.S. in January, And What Do You Do? names this trend: Portfolio Careers. The British authors Katie Ledger and Barrie Hopson offer practical tools to help you determine if you are suited to this grab-bag approach to work and what types of work you'd prefer. Read more at their website, PortfolioCareers.net. [Full disclosure: Katie Ledger is the wife of one of our UK consultants, David Pilbeam, but the coincidence of its timing in step with Tom's noticing the article on the same subject was too much for me to ignore. Besides, I liked the book.]

We normally don't promote events. But for all the visual thinkers in our audience who might be able to make their way to San Francisco in March, you really shouldn't miss Cool Friend Dan Roam's two day seminar. Not only is he a talented guy (read: you'll learn a lot), but he's a lot of fun to spend time with.

We love this story in the Financial Times, "Room to Read's results in Sri Lanka." It's about children who love books, and the success of the program founded by Cool Friend John Wood in bringing the two together.

Joy Stauber, the designer responsible for the fantastic banners at tompeters.com (watch for a new one on Monday, the first day of winter), has a manifesto up at ChangeThis: Brands Are People Too. The point being that "however a brand is born [invariably started by people], it has to have a personality that people connect to." Yes!

Cathy Mosca posted this on 12/18, in General.
Permalink | Comments (7) |

Dear God!

So my aunt, age 94 (??), being treated for a little lung goop with meds. (No such thing as "little" at that age.) Apparently it's getting better but not 100%. She goes to see a doc and he says she'll need surgery. (Big deal for any of us, VERY big deal at her age.) She insists on X-rays first. X-rays performed. She goes back to doc, asks if she needs surgery. His answer: No.

Why the hell did he quick trigger on a major diagnosis for a 94-year-old w/o "simple" evidence? Bastard!

Same aunt, some joint trouble. (Ain't it true of all of us post-55.) Referred to physical therapist. Referring doc says she'll need to stay in med facility for several days, not return to her small condo in assisted living center. She sees therapist, asks why she can't go home, describes her place in great detail. He says, "Of course you can go home."

What I've just described is inexcusable medical practice, especially for a 90+ patient, where odds of problems from surgery or significant in-patient stay are sky high; hence one should be twice as careful in making diagnosis.

Classic-garden variety outcome where overtreatment would most likely have been the result if she'd not been at the top of her game. Most, half her age, wouldn't have made the enquiries she made.

Alas, health reform package barely touches on this.

Tom Peters posted this on 12/17, in Healthcare.
Permalink | Comments (28) |

False Dichotomy!
(If Anything, Backwards!)

I was asked to contribute "a paragraph" to a writer who was doing a magazine article on "management" "versus" "leadership."

Herewith my contribution:

"It is sometimes said that the difference between 'management' and 'leadership' is 'doing things right' versus 'doing the right thing.' I think that's nuts. In fact, let's assume there is a 'doing things right' and a 'doing the right thing.' Well, both are of equal importance, and if anything 'doing things right' takes precedence. Another way to put it is that having an 'excellent strategy' is approximately worthless unless execution is equally 'excellent.' Far more things fail to come to fruition because of lousy execution than because of lousy strategy. ('Execution is strategy' is the way a boss of mine, Fred Malek, put it waaaaaay back in the 1970s.) Hence my 'take no prisoners' 'bottom line' is that 'doing things right' is as much a part of effective leadership as 'doing the right thing.'"—Tom Peters/1217.09

Comments ...

Tom Peters posted this on 12/17, in Leadership.
Permalink | Comments (41) |

Excellence: Don't Fear Failure

Tom tells a story about a man who was unafraid to fail, and why he's an Excellent role model 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).

Shelley Dolley posted this on 12/17, in Excellence.
Permalink | Comments (8) |

Tweet box

Perhaps you've noticed a red box in the right column here on the front page of tompeters.com, underneath The Little BIG Things video series. The red box contains the three most recent tweets that Tom has posted on Twitter. At the top of the box is Tom's Twitter ID (tom_peters) and you can click it to be directed to his Twitter page where you can see more of his tweets. If you're not following Tom on Twitter already, this will give you a peek at what you've been missing.

Shelley Dolley posted this on 12/17, in Announcements.
Permalink | Comments (0) |

Your Brand Can Only Be As Good As ...

[Our guest blogger is Cool Friend Steve Yastrow. Find out more about Steve at Yastrow.com.]

No matter how good your product is, no matter how good your marketing and sales are, no matter how cool your ad agency is ...

Your external brand can never be stronger than your internal brand.

In other words, what your customers think of you can never be better than what your employees think of you. At least not for very long.

It's impossible to fake out your customers. Our world has become very transparent, and your customers can see, clearly, right into the soul of your company. If you want your customers to have clear, compelling, motivating beliefs about who you are and what you do for customers, you must ensure that your company's employees have those beliefs. Otherwise, your marketing and sales promises will not resonate with the reality of being your customer.

I often ask executives if they can name one person in their company who does have some effect on the customer experience, even if that effect is indirect. No one has ever been able to name one person. (Although someone did once mention the character in the movie Office Space who covets his stapler and is relegated to an office in the basement. 'Nuff said.) Yet few companies invest adequately in building the brand inside their company. They figure it's covered by the training budget or, more frequently, they just don't do anything about it.

There is a clear connection between what your employees believe about you and how much money you make. Are you investing enough in your internal brand?

Steve Yastrow posted this on 12/16, in Branding.
Permalink | Comments (16) |

GE Model 2010?
The World Model 2010?

On March 13th of this year, the Financial Times reported that Jack Welch had reversed course on the principle he had held most dear and that had, on the back of his success in the 80s and 90s, been adopted by many if not most of America's biggest enterprises: "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy. ... Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."

The reaction by many, myself included, was nothing short of amazement. "Revising" your dogma is one thing, which most all of us have done and which is a sign of flexibility, but calling your principal claim-to-fame "the dumbest idea in the world," well that's ...

Jack's successor, Jeff Immelt, in the top slot since 2001, is a different cup of tea. He is, first and foremost, juicing up R&D and placing big bets on new products and new businesses. (He's been slowed down by putrid results at GE Capital, Welch's centerpiece and the source, in its heyday, of about half of GE's earnings—reducing dependence on GE Capital is another of Immelt's strategic goals.) The fact is that long before the Great Recession, Immelt was questioning rather directly some of GE's and indeed U.S. big business's emphasis in the prior 15 or so years. Consider this, from Mr. Immelt in 2005: "Almost every personal friend I have in the world works on Wall Street. You can buy and sell the same company six times and everybody makes money, but I'm not sure we're actually innovating. ... Our challenge is to take nanotechnology into the future, to do personalized medicine ..."

Which brings us all the way to this past Wednesday and Mr. Immelt's remarks, as reported by the FT, in an address at West Point: "We are at the end of a difficult generation of business leadership [TP query: defined by you know who, Jeff?] ... Tough-mindedness, a good trait, was replaced by meanness and greed, both terrible traits. ... Rewards became perverted. The richest people made the most mistakes with the least accountability." (To be fair, accountability has long been a GE trademark.) And if that stunner was not enough, Mr. Immelt, almost alone among high-visibility CEOs, deigned to address the struggling part of our population: "The bottom 25 percent of the American population is poorer than they were 25 years ago. That is just wrong. Ethically, leaders do share a common responsibility to narrow the gap between the weak and the strong." I'd chide Mr. I on the choice of the word "weak," but all in all, it is perhaps the most stunning-amazing-incredible reversal of course I've observed since I've began watching big business about 35 years ago—though Greenspan's acknowledgement that everything he believed most dearly, such as automatic self-regulation in the financial industry, had taken a shot below the water line, comes close to Immelt's 180-degree course change. (NB: I can't help but wonder if the strength of Immelt's remarks was tied to the setting at the USMA. It's hard to sling bullshit when you are addressing several thousand kids—and they are kids—who will be off to Afghanistan in pretty short order.)

"Meanness."
"Greed."
"Terrible."
"That is just wrong."

Wow!
And: Hooray for Jeff!
(And, about bloody time!)

Tom Peters posted this on 12/15, in Strategies.
Permalink | Comments (37) |

Toughness Does Not Preclude Decency

I applaud "toughmindedness." It's a requirement—especially in difficult times. But tough does not preclude graciousness in all its manifestations. Probably the most toughminded exec I've ever met is Milliken & Co.'s Roger Milliken. On the other hand, the South Carolina-based (Spartanburg) chief never fails to be a man of graceful behavior. At least in my experience.

Tom Peters posted this on 12/15, in Leadership.
Permalink | Comments (4) |

Success In Five Words.
Success in Nineteen Words.

It wasn't really a sleepless night. But it was "one of those nights" (not that infrequent for me) when some words start rumbling around ... and around and around. I just wanted a list of "stuff" that gets to the essence of human behavior, and thence is directly related to individual effectiveness at pretty much anything. (NB: And, ain't it always the case, "stuff" that business schools either recklessly take for granted or decide is not sophisticated enough to merit their attention.)

So here are "the real basics"—in five words. Achieve Excellence at these five things and the world (of human organizations) will pretty much be your oyster. To wit:

Read.

Write.

Talk.

Listen.

Appreciate.

Once the keyboard was at my command, I ended up (surprise!) extending the list to 19 words. Herewith:

Read.
Write.
Talk.
Listen.
Appreciate.

Walk.
Work.
Sweat.
Sweat.
Enthuse.
People.
Frontline.
Act.
Anger.
Band.
Apologize.
Weird-out.
Network.
EXCELLENCE.

Here, also in very few words, is my more or less definition of the 19 words:

Read. (Outstudy 'em.)

Write. (Clear, concise, powerful.)

Talk. (Presentation mastery. Study. Practice-practice-practice. Storytelling, mastery of.)

Listen. (Study. Practice-practice-practice. Understand enormous power thereof.)

Appreciate. (Engaged. Thoughtful. Compassionate. Appreciative always, enormous power thereof.)

Walk. (MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around. In touch. Again, learning, and learning is required, through practice.)

Work. (Work harder than the next person. "Balance"? Uhm ...)

Sweat. (Sweat the details with maniacal passion!)

Sweat. (Sweat the details with maniacal passion!)

Enthuse. (Enthusiasm moves mountains.)

People. (Great and engaged people>>>Great strategy. Best bosses = Best people developers.)

Frontline. (Firstline supervisors, quality of, determine just about everything. Must become an obsession.)

Act. (Most tries wins. Hence "most failures" is a concomitant reality—celebrate 'em.)

Anger. (Raging impatience with dumb stuff. Constantly question the status quo.)

Band. (Small, passionate, relentless bands of people/renegades change the world. Period. Avoid the hierarchy—it tenaciously defends the past in 9.9 cases out of 10.)

Apologize. ("I'm sorry," enormous power thereof. And rare, particularly among men.)

Weird-out. (Multiple, unusual sources of information and feedback.)

Network. (Develop wider-deeper-downward relationships. Think "suck down for success." Think-obsess on R.O.I.R./Return on investment in relationships. Again, women take to this instinctively.)

EXCELLENCE. (The only standard. ALWAYS CAPITALIZE ALL LETTERS.)

Over to you ...

Tom Peters posted this on 12/15, in Strategies.
Permalink | Comments (15) |

What Matters Now

Seth Godin asked a group of people, all of whom consistently generate thought-provoking ideas, to provide a page on what they're thinking about as the new year rolls in. He's turned that into a pdf called What Matters Now. Tom contributed a page called the 19 Es of Excellence. There are stellar thinkers involved, so we highly recommend giving it a gander. Read more about the project at Seth's blog.

Shelley Dolley posted this on 12/14, in Announcements.
Permalink | Comments (7) |

More Dispatches...

Master

Excellence, Version 2008

Now in TEN parts:

Part 1—General: Part 1.1, Part 1.2, Part 1.3, Part 1.4
Part 2—Leadership
Part 3—Talent
Part 4—Value Ladder
Part 5—"New" Markets
Part 6—The Equations
Part 7.1—Implementation
Part 7.2—Action
Part 8—13 Guru Gaffes
Part 9—Health"care"
Part 10—The Lists

New! Get the Mini-master, a 525-slide version of the
10-part Big Master:
Mini-Master | updated 4 Nov 2009

And, Ten Years in the Making:
The Healthcare Master—completely annotated | 9 Apr

Special

Specialized slides sets for Tom's hot topics. There are over 100 of these thought-provoking slide decks for you to explore. We encourage you to do so. Take your pick, spread them around! Sample subjects include:
The BIG Eight Courtesies | 28 Nov
The Five Courtesies | 25 Nov
Innovation 24 | 18 June
Quality & Excellence: The Quality 136 | 4 June
Heart of Strategy | 18 May
The Venturesome Economy | 21 Apr
The Talent 57 | 13 Nov
Tough Times: Excellence Execution | 4 Oct
Hammergren, addition to the Health"care" Master | 12 Aug
Iconic Books | 22 May

Event Slides

Recent events:

10-Year Archive

Introducing Project05, FREE 240-page PDF. Tom's back with a new volume of rants—if you liked Project04, you'll love this!

Find more FREE downloadable files on our Free Stuff page.

Free Stuff RSS feed

Re-imagine! has been re-packaged into four small-format plane-friendly books: Leadership, Talent, Design, and Trends. The big difference: Marti Barletta, author of Marketing to Women, coauthored Trends, and she added new content on Prime Time Women.

View a photo gallery of Tom's typical day.

As seen on public television, Tom takes his book on the road to profile how the following businesses, along with Deloitte & Touche, are excelling in a disruptive age:

TNT
Memorial Hospital
OXO
Ellie Mae
The Container Store
Jordan's Furniture

Produced for corporate trainers, the video is available through Enterprise Media, and individual case studies of the above listed companies are also available.

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