"Design is ... WHAT & WHY I LOVE. LOVE." 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.

View our Archives for past interviews.

Blog Roll

The 26th Story
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andHow To Reach Women
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dispatches from the new world of work

Leadership: The Problem Isn't the Problem

Tom argues that the reaction to the problem often becomes more of a problem than the original misstep would have been if dealt with honestly. As he's been known to say: "Foul up. Fess up. Fast. Fastidiously."

You can watch the 2:10 minute video on YouTube and, if you like, download a PDF of its transcript.

Cathy Mosca posted this on 02/03, in Leadership.
Permalink | Comments (64) |

Scary!

Scariest start of an article award 2010, from yesterday's New York Times:

"China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world's largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year. China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world's largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants. These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China."

Tom Peters posted this on 02/01, in News, Trend$.
Permalink | Comments (74) |

The Fortune Guy Is the One With the Problem

There's a Fortune article on a Goldman guy who quit. ("The Man Who Walked Away from Goldman Sachs," William Cohan, 0208.10.) The Goldman guy was worried about Goldman doing a header like Lehman. The Fortune guy wrote: ""If Goldman's stock went to zero as Lehman Brothers' had ... then Winkelried's decades of hard work would be vaporized in the blip of a Bloomberg screen."

What a horror. Namely, the fact that the Fortune guy could produce that sentence, presumably with no sense of irony.

Suppose my net worth was 100.000% wiped out this morning. I would be unhappy. Very unhappy.

But ...

But if my net worth went to zero, the value of my last several decades of work would be precisely the same, for good or for ill, as it had been before the net worth tanked.

That is, my net worth and the usefulness (if any) of my work are not related except indirectly.

I think finance is absolutely a centerpiece of our economic well-being. Hence I trust that Mr. Winkelried has done work of value to my country and the world in his decades at Goldman Sachs. I assume, in fact, that there should be a multiplier—that is, the economic usefulness of Mr. Winkelried's work is a multiple of his compensation; he's hopefully been a "net contributor" to our collective well-being.

So it's sad that the Fortune guy would only imagine valuing Mr. Winkelried in terms of his net worth—and thence assigning no societal economic value to Mr. Winkelried's decades of 20-hour days.

I know nothing about Mr. Winkelried. But I think the Fortune guy has a whopper of a problem.

(This Post is from the Auckland airport, as I await a flight to Nelson.)

Tom Peters posted this on 01/28, in News.
Permalink | Comments (29) |

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:

11-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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