|
Meet
the MasterMinds: A Conversation with Tom Peters
 It's
no surprise that Thinkers
50 rates Tom Peters as one of today's top management
thinkers. As Fortune put it, "We
live in a Tom Peters world."
Peters is the author or co-author of ten international
bestsellers, including In
Search of Excellence, which he wrote with
Bob Waterman in 1982. A self-described "prince
of disorder, champion of bold failures, maestro of zest,
and corporate cheerleader," Peters is also the
Chairman of the Tom Peters Company, a global training
and consulting organization.
His new book, Re-imagine!:
Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age,
was released in October 2003 with British publisher
Dorling Kindersley. Peters says he and this design-driven
publisher aimed at nothing less than to "reinvent
the business book."
MCNews: I spent the last few days reading your new
book.
Peters: God help you!
MCNews: What keeps going through my head is that,
in this book, art meets argument in a way that really
breathes life into the ideas.
Peters: We really enjoyed the project exactly
on that dimension. It was more work and more sheer
fun then anything I've done in twenty years. I'm
not an artist, but my wife is a designer and it was
her idea to go to the publisher Dorling Kindersley.
After I figured out what she was talking about, I started
laughing--as did my agent. But then I met them and it
seemed like the right thing to do. I don't know whether
I did a decent job, but the publisher's people sure
did.
Dorling Kindersley does elaborate designs all the time
for gardening books and so on, but they recruited additional
help for this book. They hired an absolutely fabulous
designer from London's ad world who brought his eye
for 'with it' images to the book.
We really worked our buns off so the images in the
book would reflect the message of diversity, especially
showing women as the new economy's natural leaders.
We also wanted to stress the role of design as the
ultimate competitive advantage.
MCNews: Your argument flows in a natural progression,
but it's as disruptive to go through the book as the
message itself.
Peters: I do think we have a solid linear argument
in there. When I look at the chapter headings, they
could belong to a McKinsey presentation that I might
have written twenty years ago.
MCNews: There is a linear argument, but it's also
holistic.
Peters: The editorial person at McKinsey, aka
the head honcho for linear thinking, used to get on
my case about being a circular thinker. I always took
that as a compliment, even though it meant my livelihood
was at risk at the time. But I wouldn't say that I'm
good at it. I think it's more instinct then anything
else. There is a fine balance or, more accurately, an
interesting tension between holism and linearity that
is, alas, missing from nine out of ten consulting presentations.
We had a whole book at McKinsey on the pyramid style
of writing. I assume the other big consulting firms
have something similar--very black and white, very fact-based.
But, giant companies are so unclear in their thinking
and so screwed up that, as awful as that writing style
is, it often makes a compelling case about a set of
data.
That's what is so annoying about it--unfortunately
it has its place!
MCNews: You say in the book, "It is the foremost
task--and responsibility--of our generation to re-imagine
our enterprises and institutions, public and private."
What does re-imagine mean to you?
Peters: I both love and hate that quote. I think
it's quite pompous and I'm almost embarrassed by it.
But it hit me as pretty accurate, and I think the term
re-imagine speaks for itself. The theme of the book
is that everything from the education of our youth to
the way we fight wars against elusive enemies requires
the reinvention of every type of organization.
What is going on in our world is a qualitative shift
in what organizing means. It's all so strange and
different that I don't even know what a superlative
for it would be. And I think that shift will accelerate
as technological change accelerates, which in my opinion
it will.
You can call me a slave to Silicon Valley thinking,
but this information technology revolution is as real
as it gets, and it's going to dramatically change everything
we know.
In his book, Smart
Mobs, Howard Rheingold talks about how wireless
technology will lead to the next social revolution.
The phenomenon applies to education, the military, politics
and business enterprise.
Business 2.0 had a great story about
Dawn Meyerreicks, who is the chief technology officer
of the Defense Information Systems Agency. After 9/11,
her office quickly leased all the available transponders
over Central Asia. That move led to the "Napsterization"
of the battlefield by cutting out the military middlemen
and allowing the real players on the ground to communicate
directly and instantly with one another.
MCNews: Let's talk about how such qualitative shifts
are affecting the consulting industry. For large firms,
client satisfaction is down and client "loyalty"
is way off. But the smaller firms are on a tear.
Peters: With rare exceptions like Wal-Mart,
bigness brings with it a host of problems. For the large
consultancies, part of it is bubble problems. I once
saw data in Forbes about the number of
people that Deloitte Consulting, Ernst & Young,
PwC and Accenture added in a five-year period, and it
was just insane. Just to hold the firms together is
a challenge.
To try to manage virtual armies of consultants and
weather the brutal assault on the integrity of everybody
on both the consulting and the accounting sides since
Enron, that's a double body blow. It's therefore not
surprising that the most interesting stuff would be
coming out of relatively small firms.
MCNews: You talk about how technology will cause
the outsourcing, or even extinction, of much of the
traditional white-collar work force. Is there a way
to staunch the flow?
Peters: There is a mixed message in the book.
One message says we are doomed, and then there is the
chapter about everybody heading to the value added services.
To survive as a member of any department or organization,
you have to turn yourself into a micro version of that
organization. You have to become somebody who does
value added work, sends out invoices and gets paid.
Those who want to avoid being micro-processed or out-sourced
have to learn how to do work that is worth paying for.
MCNews: How does this trend impact those in professional
services, like consultants?
Peters: When it comes to re-imaging or reinventing,
many consultants might say ho hum, because we in consulting
have always been doing this stuff to a significant degree.
Now, you are welcome to accuse me of intellectual
shoddiness, but I am arguing, without spinning the implications
out far enough, that we are going to become a nation
of consultants. Perhaps we already have. If IBM
is now IBM Global Services and UPS is UPS Logistics
instead of a bunch of guys with trucks, all of the value
added is going to come from this consulting-like intellectual
capital. I hate the term--it's been used so much you
want to puke--but it is accurate.
And for the consultants, maybe we are going to find
ourselves competing with former departments. The proof
of the pudding is IBM buying PwC Consulting. IBM turns
itself into a consultancy and what does it do? It buys
the consultants. Why wouldn't UPS do the same thing?
UPS wants to mange the entire supply chain for its
customers and probably has enough money to sink a ship.
Why not buy the consulting practice of Deloitte or Accenture?
So I think we are all homing in on the same pie.
MCNews: Will these developments make the term "consultant"
obsolete?
Peters: Potentially. I have said that it's as
stupid to use the word consulting as it is to use the
word retailing. There are one person's consultancies--maybe
a fabulous guy who does inventory management for grocers
and is worth a jillion dollars a day to do the inventory
thing for a twenty-million dollar company. And then,
at the other end of the spectrum, you have the monster
firms. So a consultant is not a consultant any more
than a retailer is a retailer.
MCNews: You make an important point in the book:
people think losing manufacturing jobs to China is a
problem but the jobs we are losing in the service sector
are a much bigger issue.
Peters: Absolutely. I was talking to a senior
guy at GE Capital today about how GE is out-sourcing
everything to India. They are out-sourcing thousands
of jobs to India, and GE Capital is a consulting company!
And the difference is that it doesn't cost a thing
for a service company to move other than making sure
there are good satellites overhead. You don't need to
move any capital equipment, and the roads and sewers
don't have to work. You just need a low hanging network
of satellites with perfect communication.
I gave a speech in Manila and I was utterly fascinated
by how Manila is now advertising itself as an alternative
to India. In the Philippines, of course, English is
spoken as a first language. They are positioning themselves
as the third largest English speaking nation after India
and the United States. They want to become the hub for
call centers for the English speaking world. It's a
national strategy and it makes all kinds of sense.
MCNews: Any thoughts on the state of business writing
today?
Peters: These strange times demand a lot of
reinventing or re-imaging, and we are in desperate
need of ideas. The fact that 98% of those ideas turn
out to be bull is totally irrelevant. If I read a book
that cost me $20 and I get one good idea, I have gotten
one of the great bargains of all time.
Also, I don't believe in holy writ. Buy fifty books
or twenty-five books, take three weeks off, read them
and make up your own theory. The fact that you end up
literally burning twenty-two out of twenty-five books
is beside the point.
One book which you may come across is by Sydney Finkelstein
called Why
Smart Executives Fail. I was listening to
an interview with the author on New Hampshire Public
Radio, which made me hysterical with laughter.
Finkelstein's book is about learning from failures.
What goes around comes around. The reason Waterman and
I wrote In Search for Excellence in 1982
was that all the writing at the time was about things
that had failed. We thought it would be nice to have
a counter-balance about a few things that worked, and
suddenly we were in the mainstream. And now we're saying
enough of that, let's learn from the failures.
MCNews: It's a pendulum isn't it?
Peters: Absolutely. That's what makes it all
fun, except for those poor souls who take themselves
too seriously.
MCNews: Last question: What's your definition of
a great consultant?
Peters: In my experience, and I bet it's true
for all of us in professional services, there are two
types: those who know the answers before they start,
and typically what they come up with is useless, and
those who have the audacity to charge the client a ton
of money and then muck around tenaciously until they
find the answers.
MCNews: Thanks for your time today.
You can find out more about Tom Peters at
www.tompeters.com.
Was this useful? Send a quick e-mail
with your thoughts.
Top
of page ^
The
World's Top 50 Management Thinkers
Which of today's thought-leaders do you
think have had the most influence on management theory
and practice? Compare your opinions to Thinkers
50, the original global ranking of the top fifty
business thinkers.
To answer the question, "Who is the
most important living management thinker?" the
panel of experts at Thinkers 50 considers criteria
such as the originality, practicality and impact of
ideas, rigor of research, loyalty of followers and presentation
style. The Thinkers 50 web site includes bios
for each of the fifty gurus who made the cut.
The Top Five:
1 Peter Drucker
2 Michael Porter
3 Tom Peters
4 Gary Hamel
5 Charles Handy
top
of page ^
| 
