Observations Archives

February 2001

PLAY BALL!

Hats off to George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates pere … who, with others, are going public in their opposition to eliminating the estate tax. Eliminating the tax would stunt charitable giving, among other things; but Buffett said it best: It would be the equivalent of “choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold medal winners in the 2000 Olympics.”

Winter in Vermont is made much more tolerable at our house by my wife Susan’s decision to order carton after carton (after carton) of Florida’s incredible Indian River grapefruit. Each morning now starts with a pitcher of this liquid gold! (John McPhee once wrote a whole book on the Indian River fruit.) The A.M. process is greatly abetted by something else worth a “WOW.” Namely, our Braun Citromatic juicer. Juicers are often the bane of one’s existence. Not this one! It’s gorgeous. (Typical Braun.) It works like a charm. And … best of all … it is insanely easy to clean.

Speaking of design (we were, weren’t we?), the just opened WORKSPHERES show at the NY Museum of Modern Art sounds fabulous. It exhibits some wild and woolly ideas of what work environments might be like in a few years.

(Design thought: Zippers must be the toughest thing to design. I bust ’em regularly on even expensive duffel bags. Of course I do stuff them a bit.)

Kudos to the assistance cart drivers in the Minneapolis airport! They are courteous and drive safely and slow! (Not true in many airports, notably DFW … whose corridors the rude, constantly beeping drivers mistake for a NASCAR track.)

WOW! Attitude! The Northwest ticket agent I dealt with in Minneapolis was a peach! Big smile. Friendly. Actually made my day. As opposed to: If I were czar I’d make it legal to punch any sales checkout clerk who transacts business with you … while continuing to talk on the phone! (Speaking of phone behavior, I’d also like to bop the “designers” who gave us singing cell phone “rings.”)

David at Village Florist in Manchester, VT is another peach! You shoulda seen the fabulous Valentine’s bouquet he arranged and delivered to Susan today! Speaking of peaches, no one outranks feisty and brilliant and determined Robyn Waters, Target’s VP for trend, design, and technical specifications. Target is hot, hot, hot … and she’s a primary driving force for making this discounter a/the national design leader. (Robyn and some of her crew attended my all-day seminar in Minneapolis yesterday.)

My doc, Keith Michl, in Dorset, VT is another pioneer. Putting the new technology to great and practical use (there’s a PC terminal in every consultation room), at the end of a visit he hands you a printout of “Doctor’s Orders,” including diagnosis and clear and complete guidelines for dos and don’ts and next steps. It’s sort of a small thing … but then again it’s not. Never happened to me before. (My wife loves it, too. When I come home, and she asks how the visit went, and I invariably mutter, “fine,” she now demands my report card!)

What idiots! That is, the morals police who claim things have gone down hill in the U.S. since the “great [Ozzie & Harriet] fifties.” Hey, anybody remember segregation? Foul air? (Burning Lake Erie, putrid L.A. air.) Unsafe work sites? Discrimination against women? (And Catholics and Jews … yes … in America.) No Medicare? The daily threat of nuclear holocaust? Rampant polio? Etc. Etc. I wouldn’t go back for love & money.

Love Clinton. Hate Clinton. Love and hate Clinton. Whatever. The Harlem office move, if it happens, is a sign of the man’s pure political genius.

Forget the bloody groundhog. Tomorrow (15FEB) … Spring Training starts! How sweet it is! Cubs and Red Sox are off to the World Series, no doubt. Damn, I hope the Yankees don’t 4peat.

Come on, “Gladiator” gets more Oscar nominations than “Traffic”? Give me a break. (Speaking of entertainment, just saw my first “Sopranos.” Love it! And while on the topic, “The Simpsons” are the best TV ever, as Time claimed last year.) (And it’s pledge Week: Don’t forget to support your local public TV or radio station. Our public radio station in VT now carries BBC at 5:30A.M. Great!)

Happy trails! And … PLAY BALL!

Tom Peters posted this on 02/14/2001.
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The Joys of Illness in a "24/7 World"

At 8:30a.m. tomorrow I pull out of the driveway in my Subaru Outback and head off to SeminarWorld. I’ve been bedded for 3 weeks (!) recovering from a wound incurred by being impaled on coral in Kaua’i. FACT: I’M NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO GOING BACK TO “WORK.” I’ve not been laid up in a decade, and my closest friends predicted I’d come unglued. WRONG! Try: First time to really think, computer-free (I had to keep my leg elevated above my heart for 10 days). HOW COOL.

The “only” thing I could do was my favorite thing on earth: READ!!!!!! My novels were chosen randomly. But their message turned out to be any thing but random. First: Diagnosis, by Alan Lightman. The author is a professor of humanities and a lecturer in physics at MIT. The protagonist is an infotech hotshot who develops a mysterious paralysis, that eventually kills him … undiagnosed. The main riff is about the fantastic (truest meaning of that word) 24/7 life many of us now lead. WHICH MAY WELL BE KILLING US. (Love-hate this quote from a respondent in Sally Helgesen’s forthcoming Thriving in 24/7: “Sometimes I feel as if my body is just a vehicle for carrying my head to my computer.”
OH SHIT! RING ANY BELLS? DID FOR ME. LOUD ONES.) My next thrilla was Caleb Carr’s Killing Time. Set in 2023, it depicts a world where the once-benign Internet has made it impossible for any of us to discern truth from fiction. Again, this hit home. Am I going soft? Am I not still a champion of the … NET WAY OF THE WORLD? (Several books by academics have rounded on me for being such an unabashed Net Cheerleader.) No, I haven’t “gone soft” in 3 weeks. BUT I AM THINKING. THINKING ABOUT HOW TRAPPED I FEEL LOTS OF THE TIME … AND THAT ONLY A SERIOUS ILLNESS CAN GIVE ME ANY RESPITE. (THAT’S A DISORIENTING THOUGHT/HYPOTHESIS.)

(Speaking of thrillas … I have just found somebody truly as good as Le Carre … somebody totally unknown to me. I’ve quickly devoured about 4 of Alan Furst’s novels. Such as ... Kingdom of Shadows, Dark Star, and Polish Officer.)

There are only a small handful of books I read and reread. For example, I’ve “done” Karl Weick’s Social Psychology of Organizing at least 8 or 9 times, re-underlining each time. This “vacation” it was my 4th heavily underlined rereading of Stephen Jay Gould’s Full House. I LOVE STATISTICS AND PROBABILITIES AND THE PROPERTIES OF VARIOUS DISTRIBUTIONS OF DATA. (There, I’ve said it.) Gould explains phenomena grand and trivial by examining the properties of variations in populations. (Means are boring and mostly useless. Standard Deviations are cool.) I’m on a wicket about renewal these days. I’ve reached an unconventional conclusion: RENEWAL IS EASY … NOT HARD ... IF YOU/YOUR ORG CAN FIGURE OUT HOW TO HANG OUT ... AND BE INFLUENCED BY, AT THE LEVEL OF “CORPORATE CULTURE” ... F-R-E-A-K-S. (I call all this Creating the High Standard Deviation Enterprise. I’m writing about it at a fiendish pace.)

Upon rereading Gould, I realized that my statistics and probabilities skills were a little (A LOT) rusty. Thence I went back to a book I’ve owned for 30+ years, William Spurr and Charles Bonini’s Statistical Analysis for Business Decisions. I HAD A BALL RE-RE-REREADING THIS BOOK. (It was my text at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1970.)

“All this” led me to the SUPER HOT “cloning thing.” Humans W-I-L-L be cloned in the next 12 months. BELIEVE IT. And it probably won’t matter! That’s my conclusion. Consider another of my “light reads,” Richard Lewontin’s The Triple Helix. Bottom line: Genetic Determinism is BULLSHIT. What matters: The INTERACTION of Genes and Environment and Random Shit that happens.

Which ... led me to reread (about time # 3) Jonathan Weiner’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Beak of the Finch. This wonderful saga explains the intricacies of the Darwinian Premise in compelling language. (And offers tips for corporate survival along the way … to be sure, inadvertently.) (It also makes one wonder about those who champion the teaching of so-called “creationism.”)

So … off I go to the “speech circuit” ... at least a little refreshed by The Joys of Illness.

- Tom Peters

Tom Peters posted this on 02/11/2001.
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