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
800-CEO-Read
Ageless Marketing
andHow To Reach Women
Katya Andresen
Tom Asacker
Asiabizblog
Jordan Ayan
Martha Barletta
Dave Barry
Ed Batista
Becker-Posner
The Big Picture
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Blog Critics
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BoingBoing
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Brand Autopsy
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Cali and Jody
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Change This
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Clear Path International
Conversation Agent
Cooking for Engineers
Copy Blogger
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Coudal Partners
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Design Gazette, jkr.co.uk
design*sponge
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Don the Idea Guy
Dooce
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eHub
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English Cut
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Ze Frank
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gapingvoid
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Great Leadership
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Hyperthinker
IDEO Eyes Open
iinnovate
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In Pursuit of Elegance
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Isenblog
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Rich Karlgaard/Forbes
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Leading Blog
Learned on Women
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Martin Lindstrom
Chris Locke
The Long Tail
Made to Stick
John Maeda
Management by Baseball
MarketingProfs:DailyFix
Marketing to Boomer Women
Mavericks at Work
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Metacool
Nick Morgan
Name Wire
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Netwoman
No Bullet Points
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Nuts about Southwest
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Persistence Unlimited
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Pink Slip
Play the Game of Life
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Portfolio Careers
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Mitch Ratcliffe
Fred Reichheld
ResearchBuzz
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Rules of Thumb
Samizdata
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Todd Sattersten
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Robert Scoble
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Rajesh Setty
Stephen Shapiro
Signal vs. Noise
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Simplicity
Smart Mobs
Sorted Books
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Halley Suitt
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The Talent Code
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Trusted Advisor
Twist Image
Web Worker Daily
David Weinberger
What's Next
Susan Willett Bird
The Wisdom of Improv
WonderBranding
Wooster Collective
Steve Yastrow
Your White Room

Tom's Bio

Without much doubt, Peter Drucker and Tom Peters have shaped the idea of modern management more than any others over the last six decades. Drucker is said to have "invented" management as a discipline worthy of study—in particular, he gave management of large firms the essential tools to deal with their post-World War II enormity, complexity, and growing global reach. Tom Peters, in turn, led the way in preparing management for the current era of staggering change, starting in the mid-1970s.

The likes of Fortune, the Economist, the New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times have said Tom is the "uber-guru" of management and inventor of the enormous "management guru industry," that "in no small part, what American corporations have become is what Peters has encouraged them to be," that Tom is "the father of the post-modern corporation," and that "we live in a Tom Peters world."

In particular, in 1982, with the publication of In Search of Excellence, Tom and Bob Waterman helped American firms deal with a crushing competitive challenge to their primacy by getting them away from strategies based on just the numbers, and re-focused on the basic drivers of all successful businesses throughout time: people, customers, values-"culture" ("the way we do things around here"), action-execution, a perpetual self-renewing entrepreneurial spirit.

As "obvious" as these ideas are, they were, are, and always will be the bedrock and differentiator of excellent enterprise—and subject to constant and remarkably rapid slippage if left untended for even a moment. As a result, Tom in 2008 still unabashedly hammers and hammers and hammers again on these always fresh ideas. If anything, he is more adamant than ever, in a "flat world," that the "eternal basics" must be kept front and center—must be any leader's abiding obsession.

On the other hand, with the passage of time, and through 15 books in total, Tom has added many a new arrow to his quiver—and cause to his portfolio of rants. For example, he became the first and loudest "guru voice" on the primacy of design as an extraordinary competitive advantage. He became the loudest, and perhaps earliest, voice on the need for employees to re-shape their careers around the idea of "brand you" (every person a "businessperson") if they are to add useful value to their firms and survive the perils of cutthroat global competition in the labor market. He became the first and loudest "guru voice" on the enormous opportunities in creating products and services to cater to the staggeringly large and absurdly underserved women's market—and the attendant need for women in senior management to support this thrust. He became one of the earliest to noisily point out the equally large and equally ignored boomer+ market that will dominate global business's attention for at least the next 25 years. More recently, he has aimed his analytic and oral guns at our largest industry, healthcare; rather than the intricacies of finance, his thrust is the equally or even more important issues surrounding operational excellence—aggressive use of information technology where shortfalls are embarrassing, an abiding emphasis on our very questionable patient safety record, so-called evidence-based medicine, long overdue "patient-centric" care, and the ridiculously under-attended issues surrounding prevention and wellness.

Tom's presentations are marked not only by his stunning breadth of interests and skill at tailoring his message to suit the needs of widely diverse audiences, but in particular by the contagious passion and energy he brings to his topic. A 20-year-old student in Korea, in May 2008, asked before a crowd of 3,000 gathered in Seoul to discuss design primacy as Korea's national strategy, "Where do you get your mind-bending passion and energy?"—an amazing tribute to his sustaining vitality and engagement.

Perhaps the Bloomsbury Press book, Movers and Shakers: The 100 Most Influential Figures in Modern Business, summed Tom's work up best. Reviewing the historical contributions of the giants of management thinking and practice, from Machiavelli and J.P. Morgan to Tom and Jack Welch, they said:

"Tom Peters has probably done more than anyone else to shift the debate on management from the confines of boardrooms, academia, and consultancies to a broader, worldwide audience, where it has become the staple diet of the media and managers alike. Peter Drucker has written more and his ideas have withstood a longer test of time, but it is Peters—as consultant, writer, columnist, seminar lecturer, and stage performer—whose energy, style, influence, and ideas have shaped new management thinking."

May 2008

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photo credit: Allison Shirreffs

Links

PDF version of Tom's Bio

A Day in the Life!

Googling (updated 6 June 2007)

Tom's Events 2002–2006 (updated 29 Nov 2006)

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Tom's Bio

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