"Read odd stuff. Look anywhere for ideas." Tom Peters

President of Environmental Defense Fund, and coauthor of Earth: The Sequel—The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming, Fred Krupp is our new Cool Friend. The book is a field guide to innovation in the alternative energy industry, primarily through a cap and trade law. Not familiar with cap and trade? Read the Cool Friends interview here.

View our Archives for past interviews.

Blog Roll

800-CEO-Read
Ageless Marketing
andHow To Reach Women
Katya Andresen
Tom Asacker
Asia Business Intel
Jordan Ayan
Martha Barletta
Dave Barry
Ed Batista
Becker-Posner
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Bigger Isn't Always Better
The Bing Blog
Bird's Eye View
Blog Business Summit
Blog Critics
John Bogle
BoingBoing
Boomer411
Brand Autopsy
BusinessPundit
BW Brand New Day
BW Deal Flow
BW Management IQ
BW The Tech Beat
Cali and Jody
Change This
Church of the Customer
Clear Path International
Cooking for Engineers
Core77
Coudal Partners
Creating Passionate Users
Mark Cuban
design*sponge
Jory Des Jardins
Betsy Devine
Don the Idea Guy
Dooce
Down the Avenue
Daniel W. Drezner
Esther Dyson
eHub
English Cut
Enterprise Media
Escapable Logic
Evhead
Steve Farber
Fast Company
Fast Lane
Brad Feld
The Fischbowl
Richard Florida
Ze Frank
Freakonomics
Free Business Tips
Gil Friend
gapingvoid
Felix Gerena
Dan Gillmor
Seth Godin
Good Experience
Gothamist
Daniel Harrison
Tom Hayes
Health Beat
Hilgenstock | Sachlichkeit
Sally Hogshead
Hyperthinker
IDEO Eyes Open
iinnovate
Influx Insights
Innovate on Purpose
Instapundit
The Intuitive Life
Isenblog
Eric Jackson
Joi Ito
Rich Karlgaard/Forbes
Josh Kaufman
Guy Kawasaki
Learned on Women
Lawrence Lessig
Martin Lindstrom
Chris Locke
The Long Tail
Made to Stick
John Maeda/SIMPLICITY
David Maister
Management by Baseball
MarketingProfs:DailyFix
Marketing to Boomer Women
Mavericks at Work
The Messaging Times
Metacool
Name Wire
Netwoman
NEXT> by Ramla
Nuts about Southwest
John O'Leary
Personal Branding
Dan Pink
Pink Slip
Play the Game of Life
Pollster
John Porcaro
Virginia Postrel
Power Line
PressThink
PSFK
Pyromarketing
Mitch Ratcliffe
Rattle-the-Cage
Fred Reichheld
re:invention
ResearchBuzz
Rethink Pink
Penelope Trunk
Re-Versioning Your Life
Jennifer Rice
Dan Roam
Kevin Roberts
Evelyn Rodriguez
Scott Rosenberg
Samizdata
Ian Sanders
Tim Sanders
Mary Schmidt
Robert Scoble
Scripting News
Doc Searls
Rajesh Setty
Stephen Shapiro
Signal vs. Noise
Slashdot
Simplicity
Smart Mobs
Sorted Books
Springwise
Startup Garden
Startupping
Biz Stone
Halley Suitt
Andrew Sullivan
Sustainable Work
Bob Sutton
TechCrunch
The Technium
TeeBeeDee
Third Age
Trend Hunter
Trend Watching
Trump University
Trusted Advisor
Twist Image
Fara Warner
Web Worker Daily
David Weinberger
What I've Learned So Far
Wild Women Entrepreneurs
Susan Willett Bird
The Wisdom of Improv
WonderBranding
Wooster Collective
Steve Yastrow

blog archives

Daily Quote Launches

Today we began a new offering from Tom—a daily email with a bit of his wisdom in your inbox. By opt-in only, of course. Today's first Tom Peters Daily Quote went to 57 recipients, but we invite you all to sign up. In the top right of this page there is an icon, which, when clicked, takes you to a page where you can subscribe to our TP Times newsletter, and now, the Daily Quote as well. Thank you to the 57 who found it and signed up without knowing when the quotes would start! We hope you and all new subscribers enjoy it.

Cathy Mosca posted this on 04/10.
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Event: HSM in Mexico City

Our old friends HSM are hosting Tom today in Mexico City. We'd love to hear from you if you were in attendance, and if you'd like to get the slides, you can use this link:
HSM, Mexico City, Mexico

Cathy Mosca posted this on 04/10.
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Not So Recent Photos

Kate at 800-CEO-READ found some photos of Tom from the Pursuit of Wow book tour in 1994 and posted them today. If you've been doing some spring cleaning and have found your own collection of Tom photos, feel free to share them with us.

Shelley Dolley posted this on 04/09.
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Tom Peters Live in London!

Opportunities to experience the fizz of a Tom Peters live presentation in London are quite rare these days. That's why we wanted to give visitors at tompeters.com a final heads-up for what is the only London public event in Tom's 2008 speaking schedule. It will take place at the QEII Conference Centre on Monday, 28th April, and Tom is sharing the "Look Beyond Change" theme of the day with Kjell Nordström. You might know Nordström from his Cool Friends spot with Jonas Riddersträle; together they wrote Funky Business and Karaoke Capitalism.

The Peters/Nordström combination promises to provide a heady cocktail for what will be a large and lively audience. Event details can be found on benchmarkforbusiness.com, or email us at team@tompeters.co.uk if you have any other questions about the day. We hope you can join us!

Richard King posted this on 04/08.
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Branding Books and More

Johnny Bunko trailer

This promotional video for (our Cool Friend) Dan Pink's new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, is pitch-perfect. It's hip, it has a sense of humor, but most importantly it captures the energy and the message of the book. Dan might as well have thrown down the gauntlet. The challenge is not whether you can create a splashy video for your new book or product, it's whether you can communicate quickly and effectively the distilled essence of its brand. Don't forget, it has to be compelling enough for your friends to want to share it.

Shelley Dolley posted this on 04/07.
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Wish I Could Bring Myself to Giggle (or At Least Smile) in Public

There's nothing to smile about in the world financial markets. The pain is spreading by the nano-second. But it's hard not to giggle at least a little. Just watching these Geniuses-of-Wall Street, who had Paul Simon perform at their kids' kindergarten graduation parties, pissing on one another is such an incredible spectacle. First, pissing on oneself: Former Citigroup chieftain John Reed celebrated the 10th anniversary of the mega-mega-mega Citicorp-Travelers merger he crafted by calling the deal a "mistake." Reed: "Stockholders have not benefited, employees certainly have not benefited and I don't think the customers have benefited." (Thanks, Johnny boy.) Mr Reed and his partner in crime, Travelers honcho Sandy Weill, of course benefited with a capital "B." Weill, having deposed Reed and run Citigroup, hand-picked Chuck Prince to succeed him, then blamed the Citigroup mess on Prince, calling the problem "poor management," as opposed to an infantile theory Weill and Reed concocted in the first place (e.g., "huge-er is better than merely huge").

Speaking of partners in crime, former Merrill Lynch boss of bosses David Komansky called the work of his chosen successor, Stan O'Neal, "absolutely criminal," the Financial Times reports. (Not a whole lot of restraint, or even vaguely adult behavior, there.) UBS, the Swiss gang of geniuses, spent a decade relentlessly "consolidating" to provide wall-to-wall-to-wall financial services to retail and commercial clients alike; and as part of the UBS flavor of the blame game explaining the loss of billions of Swiss Francs, in addition to crapping all over America per se for its bad genes, have decided that breaking up may be the new, revised wisdom du decade. For what it's worth, there's a pretty vigorous move afoot to chop up Citigroup as well; and pretty much everybody else, whose "realized synergy" was, in fact, measured by the barrels of red ink.

And, naturally, you heard it here last, Jerome Kerviel, the "rogue trader" who trashed France's SocGen almost single-handedly, is defending himself by blaming the bank for not catching him sooner!

As I said, it's all rather amusing, or would be, absent the global economic chaos that continues to boil. As an avowed enemy of almost any giant consolidations in the name of either "synergy" or the provision of "one-stop shopping," I am secretly, until now, drowning in smugness. Also, watching these geniuses turn out to have feet of maggot-infested clay is also chortle-worthy to one who has trouble with the whole Welch-ian (Jack, he who walkethed on water for 20 years—then bequeathed his successor a financial mess), "leader-as-God" phenomenon.

There's such a bizarre element of "obviousness" to this fiasco. E.g.: (1) That which goeth up and up and up doth not goeth more up and more up and more up forever and ever and ever. (You may want to write that one down.) (2) The fact that the experts (economists and mathematicians, for God's sake) had-have no idea how to value the derivatives-of-derivatives-of-derivatives, created by the bucket-load (to the tune of trillions and trillions of buckaroos), should have told anybody with a brain that the doggy doo-doo would splatter all over the fan sooner rather than later. (3) Then there was the notion that these un-understandable instruments could banish risk from the face of the earth "forever and ever and ever and ever, Amen." (4) And anybody near the coal face, with the greed meter dialed down even a little bitsy bit, might, just might, have seen that lending a half-mil or so to a jobless-homeless person might "eventually" present a problem. (Of course, history tells us that the greed meter is never dialed down in the slightest—never has been, never will be.) (5) And now the tragicomic spectacle of the creators of the mess calling the guys they stuck with the mess "criminals" for executing with vigor the strategies they concocted in the first place. (6) Not to mention Tom's favorite: Big mergers suck in 9 cases out of 8 and produce "synergistic-value" in 9 cases out of 7 and destroy lots and lots (and more lots and more lots) of value along the way.

What a hoot.
Not.
(Okay, sorta.)

Tom Peters posted this on 04/07.
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100 Ways to Succeed #112:

Ombudsman for Common Sense

As suggested above, a lot of the giant financial-economic mess we're in is courtesy a failure of common sense—sometimes, often actually, by the so-called bestest of the best and brightest. We are all "insiders" in our own worlds—and we all lose touch with reality to a lesser or greater extent.

There are a host of things one can do to deal with this, but in this instance I want only to suggest routinely running proposals or budgets, or whatever, minor as well as major, by a "common sense ombudsman." Said ombudsman, singular or plural, formal or informal, could be a spouse or a neighbor who owns a restaurant or the guy who runs the distribution center in South Podunk who you ran into at the management meeting in Orlando last year.

Napoleon captured the spirit of this idea, ever so long ago:

"The art of war does not require complicated maneuvers; the simplest are the best, and common sense is fundamental. From which one might wonder how it is generals make blunders; it is because they try to be clever." (from Napoleon on Project Management by Jerry Manas)

Tom Peters posted this on 04/07.
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High Volt-age Project from GM

General Motors is in the midst of a highly visible project that will reinvent the brand, or provide more evidence that, "GM is a sleeping giant," as a former CEO of Toyota said. The Chevrolet Volt is an electric plug-in hybrid that was introduced at the Detroit Auto Show in 2007. Bob Lutz, the design champion of the Prowler, Viper, Ford Explorer, BMW 3 series, Pontiac Solstice, Saturn Sky, and others, is the brains and the brawn behind the project. This car is cool. Forty miles on a charge from that outlet in your garage, and then, if necessary, a small combustion engine kicks in to recharge the batteries on the road. Top speed of around 120 mph, 0 to 60 scores in at a respectable, albeit quiet, 8.5 seconds. The reclamation of the GM brand as an innovator and leader in automotive technology rests on their ability to meet two publicized goals: First, it has to meet the November 2010 launch goal. Secondly, GM must meet its stated intention of selling this vehicle at a price of $30,000.00. Toyota has said it will have a similar plug-in hybrid available for public sale by that November date. The race is on! As a former GM employee and current stockholder, I am of the opinion that GM cannot afford to lose this one. To win, GM has to reinvent its management and business model. I question whether this new aggressiveness can survive in a culture bloated with bureaucracy and powerful internal departmental silos. Already, they are hedging on the $30K target, though milestones seem to be on schedule for the launch date. Here are some things I would suggest, and I really want to hear from you all on what you think they might do.

To General Motors:

[read more]

Mike Neiss posted this on 04/04.
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Ten Years in the Making!

The attachment herein [updated 7 April], more heavily annotated than any I have done before, took 10 years of preparation. I have been working on and off with healthcare issues for a decade. Thanks in part to a slew of gangbuster books that have recently appeared, I have been able to reach some temporary closure. Hence, you will find here my best shot at compassing the healthcare issue as I see it. As I say at the outset in my annotation, this presentation is not about Hillarycare or some such. It is about turf upon which I can claim some expertise—organizational and operational effectiveness. For instance, healthcare financing—except as it causes horrid distortions in priorities, a bias against improving our health—is not dealt with. (By choice.)

I hope that you will "enjoy" this, though most of the story is grim. And I hope that some of you might spend some serious time on the presentation, and give me your feedback. And of course, as always, I hope you will "rob me blind"—and use some of this material in your own work.

Americans mostly think we have the best healthcare in the world, even if the most expensive. In short, that doesn't fit with the fact that our life expectancy is 45th globally and dropping, that our hospitals unnecessarily kill hundreds of thousands of us each year, and that seeking care at our most prestigious healthcare centers will surely reduce our lifespan compared to care at "St Elsewhere," as one writer put it.

Read on!

Tom Peters posted this on 03/31.
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Love It or Leave It

The speaking business, that is. That's Tom's advice for new authors who are considering speaking as a career. (Never the half-way sort, that's Tom's career advice for anyone. Period.) Tom spoke with Jon Mueller at 800-CEO-READ's Author Blog today about his chosen profession. They covered a lot of ground concerning the ins and outs of being a professional speaker. If you're curious about how Tom got his start, or how to communicate effectively with an audience (including one that speaks another language), you should listen to this half hour interview.

Shelley Dolley posted this on 03/28.
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Depression as Opportunity?

At a client meeting this week, I was taken aback when he deliberately chose to describe the current economic outlook in the UK with the word "depression." I have become used to talking to colleagues and clients alike about the coming recession, but a depression is entirely a different matter. I've never lived through one of those! This client is the CEO of a financial services group and extremely well connected in UK banking circles. If he's thinking and talking this way, so, too, I bet, are the heads of many other sizeable financial institutions.

Our conversation moved on to what the best strategies were for both our businesses to successfully navigate through the testing times that lie ahead. What could he do, and did we have anything different to offer that might help him to do it better or more quickly? You won't be surprised that most of the "common sense" stuff we began to discuss, in nautical parlance at least, focused on "lightening the ship, battening down the hatches, and hoping to be amongst those who survived the storm." But we're the Tom Peters Company, dammit!

Back in 1990, Tom released a brilliantly counterintuitive video called "Recession as Opportunity—smart moves for tough times!" Its core message for those dark days was that "smart people should redouble their attention to improving product quality and service excellence." This was a good place to start and changed the tone of our conversation. We then talked about the importance of engaging peoples' hearts and minds, and especially so in tough times. Everyone on the payroll has to do work that is worth their wages. How to make "the work matter" to people. Creating a context where people can do the best work of their lives. Spreading messages of doom and gloom all round the patch certainly won't do that.

I left the session feeling quite pleased with my contribution to the debate. I might have helped my client to get past his personal malaise and into some "uncommon sense" areas where he could deploy his considerable leadership talent to potential competitive advantage. But I came back to earth with a bump today when I read the current Annual Review and Summary from HBOS plc (a competitor of my client), and found this comment prominent in CEO Andy Hornby's remarks: "As we face the unprecedented financial turmoil in global markets, our focus on colleague [talent] development has never been more important. Our ability to execute our strategy within these tough markets relies on engaging with, and motivating, our colleagues to deliver consistently outstanding performance."

Perhaps the common sense stuff came at the end of the discussion, and not at the start? Does anyone have any stories of people who are already making smart moves for tough times?

Richard King posted this on 03/28.
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Cool Friends: Gibson and Skarzynski

Our new Cool Friends, Rowan Gibson and Peter Skarzynski, have a combined experience of over 40 years in helping organizations become more innovative, seize new growth opportunities, and invigorate their approach to markets. Rowan is a well-known speaker and the author of the best-selling Rethinking the Future. Peter is co-founder with Gary Hamel of the innovation strategies company Strategos, which helps organizations "build a systemic capability to innovate." Peter and Rowan have combined their expertise to write the new (out last week!) Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates. It goes beyond the reasons why innovation is imperative to how you make innovation happen, where to get fresh insights for your particular problems, how to measure your innovation program, and how to know if it's being implemented effectively within the organization. Read their Cool Friends interview to learn more.

Cathy Mosca posted this on 03/26.
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Wow!

Got my foot caught in power cord, here in my Las Vegas hotel room. Hence, my computer did not just "fall off a table" three feet high—it flew (!!) off the table, landing about three, or perhaps more, feet away. It "took a licking and kept on ticking." Hooray for my Panasonic CF-W5 TOUGHBOOK!

Tom Peters posted this on 03/25.
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Event Slides: Kindred Healthcare

As Tom says above, he is in Las Vegas, and he's speaking to a group from Kindred Healthcare. You might recall that healthcare is at the top of Tom's list of reading subjects recently, so I'm sure he has a great deal to say to them. If anyone who attends the event would like to comment, we'd love to hear from you! If you'd like to get the slides, you can download them here: Kindred, Part 1 and Kindred, Part 2

Cathy Mosca posted this on 03/25.
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Four Hearty Cheers!

Shopping for Easter dinner in a crowded Shaw's [market] in Manchester Center VT at about 1 p.m. Saturday. As I check out, I'm delighted to see a bagger—an effort to relieve congestion. I am even more delighted to see that my bagger is the Store Manager!!

Four hearty cheers! (And, alas, ever so rare.)

Tom Peters posted this on 03/24.
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100 Ways to Succeed #111:

Get Out And About!

Get out! [Of your office.]
Get out!
Get out!
Get out!
Now! [Within the ... hour!]
Now!
Now!
Now!

[Attached, as a reminder, is a link to our "'Top 50' 'Have Yous,'" PDF or PPT, posted earlier.]

Tom Peters posted this on 03/24.
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Next!
Now!

I love some of Michael Crichton's books. And have real problems with others.

But I heartily recommend Next, just out in paperback. It's called "fiction," but it is already mostly (?) true. The genetic revolution has great promise—and great peril. Some may call this book "alarmist"; I am not among them. How about "instructive"?

Tom Peters posted this on 03/24.
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Simply the Best!

I am doing more and more work in healthcare. I am not engaging in the policy debate—or at least only marginally. Instead, I am interested in why we spend so much money, and yet trail Bosnia in life expectancy. (Our rank: 45.)

Along the way, and recently, I came across Phillip Longman's Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Healthcare Is Better Than Yours. All I'll say is that it is a stunning book, and the claim holds up.

Consider: "Generally, the more prestigious the hospital you check into, and the more eminent and numerous the physicians who attend you, the more likely you are to receive low-quality or even dangerous and unnecessary care."

Attached you will find some extracts from the book (and from Shannon Brownlee's Overtreated) that I've collected. If you are interested in 1/7th of our economy, let alone your health, read on. (One result of the book is my declining a major test that would have been of marginal value—and since it was intrusive, it would have exposed me to many of the factors that lead to our hospitals unnecessarily killing between 100,000 and 300,000 patients per year.*)

[*"The results are deadly. In addition to the 98,000 killed by medical errors in hospitals and the 90,000 deaths caused by hospital infections, another 126,000 die from their doctor's failure to observe evidence-based protocols for just four common conditions: hypertension, heart attack, pneumonia, and colorectal cancer." TP: total 314,000. FYI: In one evaluation, by the prestigious RAND consultants, the VA system ranked first on 294 measures of quality, compared to other major systems.]

[Now I'm starting on the very new Our Daily Meds, by Melody Petersen—yet another damning treatise.]

Tom Peters posted this on 03/24.
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The "Little Stuff"

As you know, at the moment I'm obsessed with the "little stuff"—as I have called it here, the "last 98%," that is the heart of implementation-execution. Here, without comment, is another factoid—with which most of you are already familiar. Body language accounts for about 60% to 80% of so-called "verbal" communication. No surprise, women are muuuuuuuuuuuch better at reading body language than men.

My most recent source is the very readable (fun) The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease. [They also authored another of my fun-but-serious favorites, Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps.]

Tom Peters posted this on 03/24.
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Dr Franklin "Gives Good Tea"

As you recall I offered up last week Excellence for "The Rest of Us." This weekend I wrote an alternate introduction: "Dr Franklin 'Gives Good Tea': America Defeats Great Britain!" It's attached.

Tom Peters posted this on 03/24.
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So, Work Really Does Matter ...

Readers of this blog will be well aware of the TP/TPC bias towards work. For many years now, the mantra "the work matters" has been at the heart of Tom's and TPC's philosophy, so it is always heartening when solid research comes to the same conclusions as we do! A recent study in the UK by CHA Communications Consultancy has shed light on the motivation that people have towards their work. Their study of over 1500 UK employees from across public, private, and charity sectors points to the fact that over three quarters of those surveyed want to feel that the work they are doing is worthwhile. Their definition of what makes a job worthwhile: that the work contributes to society, that it is a job they can do well, and that it is a job they can be proud of.

Sadly, almost half of those surveyed are looking for a more worthwhile job than the one they now have. And ironically, although those in the private sector see the charitable and public sectors as being more promising places to find worthwhile work, at the same time, a quarter of public and charity sector workers are frustrated enough by bureaucracy and red tape to be considering a move in the opposite direction!

I am left wondering, in today's world of Brand You, whether the challenge of finding meaning in one's work should be down to the employee herself? Surely it is up to each of us to make the connections and to discover for ourselves the purpose in what we are employed to do? It would be great if leaders could do this for us, but since work means different things to each of us, surely we have at least some responsibility to do this for ourselves?

To follow the tone of Tom's recent "reality" blog, what do you believe is realistic to expect of our leaders as they set a context for our work? And what should be done by people for themselves?

Madeleine McGrath posted this on 03/21.
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Sub-prime Primer

A friend sent me the attached. I'm not in the habit of using this Blog to, effectively, forward email, but this was-is too good to pass up.

Brilliantly rendered!
All too true!

[We'd love to credit the person who put this together, but her-his name did not accompany the file. We'll certainly add a credit if anybody claims ownership.—CM]

Tom Peters posted this on 03/19.
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Wrong.
Thirty Times Over.

While on holiday in New Zealand ... I got to thinking. As time goes by, "one" (me) tends to complexify one's approach to almost everything. The innocence (and clarity) of "days gone by" is blurred. I know that I am "guilty as charged." (By me.) And I think most of the other "gurus" (horrid term, but it's become part of the biz language) have also gotten away from reality. Hence, I began taking notes for a book-like "thing" that is not, in fact, a book. I titled it:

Excellence for "The Rest Of Us":
A "Book" for "Real People," Working in "The Real World" in 2008

The book-that's-not-a-book begins with a Thirty Count Indictment of "guruworld." I have provided 30 contrasting pairs, "Guru focus" versus "RW," Real World. Below I am offering the list, FYI.

The "Indictment" is the opener of a 62-page (so far) "paper" (that's not a book). Attached you will find the entire 62-page, 19,000-word plus document.

Enjoy!
(Or not.)
More to come!

[If you wonder about the origin of "all this," perhaps the sign, discovered on a beach on Golden Bay, New Zealand, will offer a hypothesis.]

Guru focus versus the "real world":

Guru focus: Big companies and attendant first-order, industry-redefining strategic issues.
Real World: Most of us, still, in 2008, don't work for Big Companies; we labor in "SMEs," Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. (Or the likes of government agencies.) And if we are in a big company or agency, most of our focus is the 17-person department in which we labor. (As to "SMEs," Germany is, ahead of China, the planet's #1 exporter, thanks mainly to focused, high-end middle-sized companies, the Mittlestand enterprises.)

Guru focus: Public corporations.
RW: Most of us work in privately owned companies. (Or in those government agencies.)

Guru focus: Cool industries.
RW: Most of us aren't in "Cool" industries, we do pretty ordinary stuff—like my pal, Larry Janesky, who makes a buck, and then another ($60 million, actually), creating "dry basements," that are free of toxic mold and can be used as a spare room or for a playroom or storing anything and everything; or Australian Jim Penman, who has over 2,500 franchises worldwide doing such things as walking dogs, washing dogs, and installing antennae.

Guru focus: "Excellence" is reserved for GE and GE and GE (or Google or, until last week, Boeing).
RW: "Excellence," bar none, is the fabulous, friendly, informative, instantly responsive pharmacy next door that takes on docs and insurance companies with vigor and usually victory. (Gary Drugs on Charles Street in Boston, for me.)

Guru focus: Boss-less, flat, friction-free, self-defining organizational settings.
RW: Most of us have "bosses." Most of us are assigned tasks.

Guru focus: "Getting ahead" means becoming a "Brand You," in a world where what our peers think of us is more important than the Boss's evaluation.
RW: Most of us still must cater to our bosses to get ahead.

Guru focus: "Cover boy" CEOs with G-4s, trophy wives, and the kids from all three marriages in prep schools with tuitions starting at $50K.
RW: Most of us work for government agencies or in schools or fire departments or in private companies perhaps run by the "millionaire next door," who owns two suits, a 2006 Lexus, stops in the coffee shop on the way to work, and sends his kids to public school.

Guru focus: New "virtual organization" forms of doing business; workplaces with hierarchy are "so yesterday."
RW: Most of us work amidst a rather clear "hierarchy" as depicted on a standard organization chart. (Though there are probably a few less layers then there were a few years ago.) (Want hierarchy? Try Home Depot.)

Guru focus: Creative right-brain weirdos, "with it" in these odd times.
RW: The majority of us are not "new age creatives," but are occasionally quite clever ... and pretty good at "blocking and tackling" in order to "get done what needs to be done."

Guru focus: The immediate threat, to millions upon millions, of being "outsourced."
RW: Most of us aren't especially threatened by the prospect of having our jobs outsourced to India or China or Romania.

Guru focus: Global enterprises "playing in the big league," in a "flat world."
RW: Many (most) of us are only marginally affected by globalization, and our firms don't sell more than a modest share of their products or, especially, services beyond our national borders. (The primary reach of the 18-person accountancy in a mid-sized city of 84,000 is perhaps three miles.)

Guru focus: A world where "the Web is everything, changes everything."
RW: Most of us haven't had our world turned anything like "upside down" by the Web, though the Web has surely had a significant impact. (We communicate with the plumber by Blackberry email from our car, but he's still 5 hours late!)

Guru focus: Our ability to be in instant communication with anyone, anywhere.
RW: Use email, but still practice MBWA—Managing By Walking Around.

Guru focus: An encompassing IS-IT strategy, with everything wired to everything else.
RW: While integrating IS is very important, most of us muddle through, trying to ensure that the IT-enhanced bits (the front-line sub-systems) are marvels of simplicity that deliver the goods for those front-line folks and their internal-external customers.

Guru focus: Strategic planners and CEOs desperately seeking "blue oceans."
RW: Most of us don't spend much or any of our day making grand plans. Never have. Never will.

Guru focus: Thinking "outside the box," of course.
RW focus: Most of us obsess on "doing," pretty much inside the box. (There are enough damn problems in the box—pissed off customers of long standing, etc.)

Guru focus: Complex "systemic change."
RW: Most of us believe in and spend our time doing on-the-cheap, rapid experimentation, picking off the "low-hanging fruit," muddling our way through to big change.

Guru focus: Imposing words-phrase such as "business models," "scalable," "strategic talent management," "customer-retention management," and "knowledge-management paradigm."
RW: Most of us try to use everyday language such as "the way we make a buck" (instead of "business model"), "let's grow this sucker" (not "Is it scalable?"), "hire good people and treat 'em well and give 'em a chance to shine and thank 'em for the stuff they do" (rather than "strategic talent management"), "bust our ass to keep our customers happy to keep 'em coming back" (instead of "customer-retention management"), and "share the stuff you learn with everybody ASAP, don't hoard it" (rather than "executing a knowledge-management paradigm").

Guru focus: Best data base + sexiest algorithms win in our customer-centric enterprise.
RW: Most of us spend our time on "trivial" acts of relationship building with customers, suppliers, leaders in our community, etc.

Guru focus: The relentless pursuit of "synergies."
RW: Most of us focus, focus, focus in order to stand a chance of succeeding in the marketplace. (Those astounding German "Mittlestand" companies again, or Larry Janesky, the dry-basement guy.)

Guru focus: Marketing sleight of hand!
RW focus: Sales! Sales! Sales!

Guru focus: Put the customer first!
RW focus: Put the front-line employee and the front-line manager co-first! (In order to maximize the odds of repeat business.)

Guru focus: Acquisitions and mergers aimed at expanding our "reach" and "market penetration" and "market share" amidst a zero-sum game, thus reducing risk courtesy a "diverse" portfolio and smothering ("killing") the competition.
RW: Play from our strengths, work like hell to enhance those strengths, and survive-thrive via "organic" growth and executing very, very well.

Guru focus: Totally "new rules for a new game," dramatic new "management tools" that "change everything."
RW: Most of us are learning new things, but nothing that's particularly "revolutionary" as we labor mightily (fulltime) "just" to "get stuff done," improve relationships, find good folks and keep 'em by showing appreciation and respect, and providing opportunities to get ahead.

Guru focus: Hiring PhD mathematicians to design obscure algorithms that allow the creation of the likes of "risk free" derivatives and, hence, stunning "competitive advantage."
RW: For most of us, snappy execution of the "timeless" "basics" is Job #1. (And Job #2. And Job #3.)

Guru focus: A fetish for the diabolically clever.
RW: Most of us know that "relentless" pounding and pounding and pounding, and then pounding some more, on those Golden Basics wins.

Guru focus: Built to last.
RW: Most of us muddle through, trying to make it to the end of the week while keeping our customers content.

Guru focus: Disruptive Innovation is #1.
RW: We "invent" everyday "tools," such as Xeroxed (paper) checklists, aimed at preventing "line infections" and thus saving thousands-of-lives-per-year of ICU patients, in the U.S. (In a similar vein, as it were, the British observers estimate that over ten thousand lives per year could be saved in hospitals by providing most patients with compression socks that help prevent deep-vein thrombosis.) (Call it "un-disruptive innovation," with inordinate power?!)

Guru focus: Describe "new age" mortgage bankers, loaded with "intellectual capital" and "integrated systems" who "package" loans as soon as possible and sell them to financial service institutions who create and sell derivatives based on the packaged mortgages—which are in turn re-packaged as super-derivatives.
RW: As, say, a young mortgage-lending officer in a town of 18,000, whose Dad runs a local car dealership, take Mary and John to lunch to get a grasp of who they are before lending them $450,000; and after the loan, call or drop by every, say, three or six months to see how things are going—even if all payments have been on time.

Guru focus: "Changing demographics," "the new Gen X world," as many discrete market segments as there are customers.
RW (I wish): Our primary customers [85% of the time] are women—find the right team [lotsa women in senior management] and go for it. We also, to make a buck, have gotta aim more at boomers or near-boomers, and "geezers" [who collectively have all the dough], and less on callow, so-called "trendsetter" youth.

There's my thirty—and I plead "guilty-as charged" to many-most of them!

Tom Peters posted this on 03/18.
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New Cool Friend: Dan Roam

Looking at a problem vs seeing a problem

Cool Friend Dan Roam says that a picture is worth a thousand words, but only the first thousand you'd need to get briefed on the issue at hand. He helps big name clients solve complex problems by using simple pictures like the one above. In his new book (out today!), The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, he explains that you don’t have to be good at drawing to use visual thinking for communicating ideas. Find out more by reading the interview. You can also visit the website of the consulting company he founded, Digital Roam Inc., or read his blog.

Cathy Mosca posted this on 03/13.
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