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.

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andHow To Reach Women
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Tom's Bio

When Tom and Bob Waterman produced In Search of Excellence over 25 years ago, they effectively introduced the world of business to the notion of Excellence per se, a state of mind and daily practice not normally associated with enterprise, and an inspiring and profitable aspiration at a time when America's competitiveness was under full-blown assault. In short, then and now, the unwavering pursuit of Excellence, from the finance department to after-sales service, in the car dealership and police department as well as the bank branch and aircraft factory, provides the basis for an unmatchable competitive advantage—and acts on one and all as an ongoing spur to pathbreaking achievement. And in our global village, getting flatter by the day as it is, Excellence is a universal idea-ideal (think Olympics) that translates and transports across all borders.

In 1999, Search was honored by NPR as one of the "Top Three Business Books of the Century"—and ranked as the "greatest business book of all time" in a poll by Britain's Bloomsbury Publishing. Tom followed Search with well over a dozen additional international bestsellers. Among them: A Passion for Excellence (with Nancy Austin); Thriving on Chaos; Liberation Management (acclaimed as the "Management Book of the Decade" for the '90s); and the provocative, colorful Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. His latest is The Little BIG Things: 163 ways to Pursue Excellence, published in 2010 by HarperStudio. Along the way, several Tom Peters biographies have been written, including: Corporate Man to Corporate Skunk: The Tom Peters Phenomenon and Tom Peters: The Bestselling Prophet of the Management Revolution (part of a four-book series of business biographies on Peters, Bill Gates, Peter Drucker, and Warren Buffet).

Tom, who is widely credited with almost single-handedly "inventing" the "management guru industry," now billions of dollars in size, writes, reflects, and then presents about 50 seminars each year, well over half outside the U.S. (In a recent two-week period, he spoke in Korea, Mexico, and Croatia.) Tom estimates that since 1978, when the work on Search began, he's given well over 2,500 speeches, flown 5,000,000+ miles, spoken before 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 people and presented in 48 states and 63 countries. Also, since 2004, Tom has devoted much of his "at home" energy to the award-winning (a "Top 500" designation) blog—www.tompeters.com.

Leadership guru Warren Bennis, the only person close to both Tom and the late Peter Drucker, told a journalist, "If Peter Drucker invented modern management, Tom Peters repainted it in Technicolor." In fact, as even Tom's book titles indicate ("Excellence" ... "Passion" ... "Liberation"), his passion is passion: Destruction & Re-imagining ... finding and liberating Talent for a hypercompetitive world ... the Herculean task of sustaining Entrepreneurial Excellence ... an enterprise-wide obsession with design that produces products and services of the sort that Steve Jobs calls "insanely great." Among Tom's newer campaigns are: Women-as-Leaders especially suited for these times; gaining advantage in the enormous, underserved market represented by Women (controllers of three-fourths of the world's wealth) and among the burgeoning, absurdly financially potent and absurdly underserved Boomer-Geezer population in the likes of North America, Europe, and Japan. In the last 24 months, Tom has become fixated on Operational Excellence in our biggest "industry," healthcare—in particular the life-extending opportunities associated with an unswerving focus on Prevention and Wellness and a relentless emphasis on Quality and Safety.

In 2008, Tom has once again shifted gears, and is renewing his dedication to the "eternal basics" of implementation-execution, among other things a topic of research he pioneered at Stanford in the 1970s. "We create and then get caught up in, me included, an endless parade of fads," he says, "but while the world is indeed changing, the basics of 'getting things done through people' remain the same as they were a hundred, or hundreds, of years ago—and it is failures in implementation that trip us up in 9 cases out of 10, from a primary school in Nashville or Nigeria to 'nation-building' in Basra and Baghdad. In business, for example, developing a brilliant 'blue ocean strategy,' today's hot buzzphrase, is all well and good, but make no mistake, enthusiastic people executing like maniacs in that ocean are the only thing that will keep it blue and keep you sailing with spinnaker full! 'Excellence in Execution'—particularly cross-functional execution—was, is, wherever, and forever will be Sustainable Competitive Advantage #1."

Born in Baltimore in 1942 with a lacrosse stick in his hands, and residing in California (mainly Silicon Valley) from 1965–2000, Tom and his wife Susan Sargent now live on a 1,600-acre working farm, "always under construction," in Vermont. He is a civil engineering graduate of Cornell (B.C.E., M.C.E.) and earned an MBA and Ph.D. at Stanford; he holds honorary doctorates from institutions that range from the University of San Francisco to the State University of Management in Moscow. In the U.S. Navy from 1966–1970, he made two deployments to Vietnam (as a combat engineer in the Navy Seabees) and "survived a tour in the Pentagon." He was a White House drug-abuse advisor in 1973–74, and then worked at McKinsey & Co. from 1974–1981, becoming a Partner and co-founder of the now gargantuan Organization Effectiveness practice in 1979.

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."

March 2010

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