The Pursuit of WOW! Every Person’s Guide to Topsy-Turvy Times
by Tom Peters
Vintage Books
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York
For Robert and Sarah
What recommends commerce
to me is its enterprise and
bravery. It does not clasp
its hands and pray to Jupiter.
—Henry David Thoreau
Contents
Starters
PAGE 1
Getting Things Done
PAGE 27
Milk, Cookies, and Managing People
PAGE 55
Pens, Toilets, and Businesses That Do it Differently
PAGE 95
Just Say No to Commodities (and Yes to Free Spirits)
PAGE 139
Breaking the Mold
PAGE 161
The Wacky World or (Mostly), What Have You Done about Asia Today?
PAGE 197
Searching for the Diversity Advantage
PAGE 219
Tomorrow’s Strange Enterprises
PAGE 243
Entrepreneurs’ Dreams
PAGE 263
Lists!
PAGE 279
Attaining Perpetual Adolescence
PAGE 301
Parting Shots
PAGE 321
Foreword
This book is about generating yeasty responses—personal and corporate—to these very
yeasty, and frequently frightening, times. I’ve called it The Pursuit of WOW!
“Wow” might sound a bit frizzy. I think not. I’m repeatedly struck by the parade of
“new” cars that look like every other car, by how many opened French restaurants or justlaunched PCs or software packages fail to zap you, by how one Big Six audit service
resembles all the others. And I’m also struck by how timid most people are in fending off
staleness. Then they wonder why they become a statistic in the continuing middle
management and senior professional blood bath.
In preparing this book I’ve looked back on my ten years of writing syndicated columns,
had lengthy conversations with dozens of successful entrepreneurs—and convened a
session of FedEx employees to talk about diversity. But mostly I’ve let my daily
exposure to business over the last 25 years lead my mind where it will: I wondered why I
feel compelled to go to London to buy chubby Ball Pentel Fine Point R50 pens.
Wondered why thank you notes are always appreciated. Why success (personal, business)
invariably leads to hardening of the arteries. Thought about why certain delis 9and
churches), in a world full of delis (and churches), reach out and suck you in
instantaneously—while so many others only give you a case of the blahs. And why any
employee would put up with mistrustful firms that practice random drug testing,
unannounced call monitoring, and the like.
All in all, you’ll find 210 numbered observations, from one line to several pages in length
and loosely collected by topic in 13 more-or-less chapters.
The common bond is ... WOW: stepping out (individuals at all levels in a firm and
independent contractors) and standing out (corporations and other organizations) from the
growing crowd of look-alikes.
Being average has never had much appeal. Better to fail with flair in pursuit of something
neat. While I think that’s an idea for the ages, right now it takes on great urgency.
India, China, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, the Philippines, Malaysia, ‘Thailand,
Indonesia—and more—are coming online. They’re chock-a-block with hundreds of
millions of talented, well-educated workers—and already producing sophisticated, highquality goods that are often the equal of the best from the monster U.S., Japanese, and
German economies.
To stay on top of this fermenting global brew will require people and companies to
paddle like never before; will require—again—personal and corporate WOW. (And the
renewal thereof—in perpetuity.) I hope the ideas from these pages will help you strip off
the blinders (the crazy past is soon going to look like mellow prelude) and move yourself
toward bold and daring action.
I’ve had a ball pulling all this together. And now I hope you’ll have a ball reading it. I say
“had a ball” on purpose and without apology. I think work and business can be creative
and exciting. A hoot. A growth experience. A journey of lifelong learning and constant
surprise. But, to be honest, I think such rewards will only be yours if you learn to
approach your career and enterprise with the strategy I call ...
... THE PURSUIT OF WOW!
Good luck!
Viel Glück!
Buena Suerte!
Bonne Chance!
Starters
1. One-Minute Excellence
One-minute excellence. I can sense the curling of your lips. While such a catchphrase
makes me shudder, too, it contains a gem waiting to be discovered.
How do you go on an effective diet? How do you stop smoking? How do you stop
drinking?
In short, you do it and it’s done. Then you work like hell for the rest of your life to stay
on the weight-maintenance, non-smoking, or booze-free wagon.
A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you
want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing
less-than-excellent work.
The idea is profound.
Suppose you’re a waiter and, for your own future’s sake (not because of pressure from
the clowns who run the restaurant), you decide to set a matchless standard for service.
How? You do it. Now.
Sure, you’ll be clumsy at first. You’ll get a lot of it wrong. You’ll need to read up, listen
to audiotapes, take classes, tune in to online electronic chat rooms, visit other restaurants
to collect clues. And you’ll need to keep doing such things to maintain your edge (as an
opera singer or professional athlete does) until the day you hang up your corkscrew.
Nonetheless, you can become excellent in a nanosecond, starting with your first guest
tonight. Simply picture yourself, even if it’s a very fuzzy picture, as the greatest waiter
ever—and start acting accordingly. Put yourself in lights on Broadway, as a galaxy-class
waiter; then perform your script with derring-do.
Does it sound wild? Silly? Naïve? Maybe, but it isn’t. The first 99.9 percent of getting
from here to there is the determination to do it and not to compromise, no matter what
sort of roadblocks those around you (including peers) erect.
The last 99.9 percent (I know it adds up to more than 100 percent—that’s life) is working
like the devil to (1) keep your spirits up through the inevitable storms, (2) learn
something new every day, and (3) practice that something, awkward or not and no matter
what, until it’s become part of your nature.
What holds for the waiter also holds for the manager of the six-person department or the
chief executive of the 16,000-person firm.
How long does it take you, as boss, to achieve world-class quality? Less than a
nanosecond to attain it, a lifetime of passionate pursuit to maintain it.
Once the fire is lit, assume you’ve arrived—and never, ever look back or do anything, no
matter how trivial, that’s inconsistent with your newfound quality persona.
Suppose you commit to achieving new heights in quality or service here and now. In your
own mind, you’re an instant Nordstrom (retail) or Motorola (manufacturing). But your
next task—dad-blamed real world—is to go through your boring in-basket.
What an opportunity! Respond to the first item that turns up as you imagine a Nordstrom
or Motorola exec would.
A memo from a frontline worker complaining about a silly impediment to improvement?
A request to change office-supply vendors? An irate note from a customer or distributor?
“Nordstrom” it. “Motorola” it. Act out, in a small way, your Nordstrom-Motorola fantasy
of matchless quality.
Sure, if you keep it up for even a few hours, people all over the organization will start
looking at you oddly. You want them to, because you’ve achieved your first tiny victory.
You, Ms. Planet-class Quality, are living a new life. Their misfortune is that they haven’t
figured it out for themselves yet.
Does all this amount to a quarter-baked pep talk better delivered under a revival tent?
Hardly. (And if you don’t believe me, ask a friend in Alcoholics Anonymous, perhaps the
most effective change program on earth today.) You see, the deeper point is that you’ll
either change in a nanosecond—or never. It’s true with booze, smokes, fat, and worldclass quality. The determined shift of mindset is an all-or-nothing deal.
In case you can’t tell, I’m fed up to my eyebrows with execs (and folks of every other
rank) who talk about how l-o-n-g it takes to achieve change. That’s pure rubbish. It takes
forever to maintain change (“One day at a time,” according to AA); but it takes just a
flash to achieve change of even the most ;profound sort.
One morning in Houston almost six years ago, I changed. I was a non-exerciser. But that
day, for a lot of not very significant reasons, I went out at 5 a.m. and took my first,
bumbling speed walk. Eleven minutes later (OK, more than a few nanoseconds), I was
hooked. True, every day since I’ve fretted that I’ll renege. Exercise is a lifetime pursuit,
which causes pain come days (e.g., as I write, it’s unseasonably cold, rainy, and getting
late). But as of that morning in Houston, I am a no-baloney, world-class, rudely dogmatic
exerciser.
Change is that simple. Honest.
2.
“Honor your errors. A trick will only work for a while, until everybody else is doing it.
To advance ... requires a new game. But the process of going outside the conventional
method ... is indistinguishable from error. ... Evolution can be thought of as systematic
error management.”
Kevin Kelly
Out of Control: The Rise
of Neo-Biological Civilization
When, oh when, will we learn to honor error? To understand that goofs are the only way
to step forward, that really big goofs are the only way to leap forward?
Bosses who don’t support the importance of failure are public nuisance No.1 in my book.
3. Attentiveness
The poet Mary Oliver, in her touching Mockingbirds, tells of an impoverished old couple
who responded to the knock of strangers at their door. The poor folks had no worldly
goods to offer the unexpected visitors, only “their willingness to be attentive.”
The unbidden guests turned out to be gods—who surprised their hosts by treating their
attentiveness as the finest gift mere humans could have made.
I suspect that the story, with its small but grand revelation, resonates with most of us,
and, paradoxically, especially so in these topsy-turvy times. Overwhelmed by new
technologies, new competitors, new everything, we hold the gift of human attention—
from the sales clerk or nurse who looks you directly in the eye, rather than conversing
while staring blankly at the computer screen or medication tray in front of her or him—to
be the most munificent of blessings.
But can we do more than nod our heads and mutter “Amen”? For starters, we can bring
hard, cold statistical evidence to bear on this topic that might better seem the province of
poets or Zen masters.
Consider research done by the Forum Corporation, which analyzes commercial
customers lost by 14 major manufacturing and service companies. Some 15 percent of
those who switched suppliers did so because they “found a better product”—by a
technical measure of product quality, such as a greater mean time between failures or a
lower defects score. Another 15 percent took off because they found a “cheaper product”
somewhere else. Twenty percent of the lost customers hightailed it because of the “lack
of contact and individual attention” from the prior supplier; and 49 percent left because
“contact from old supplier’s personnel was poor in quality.”
70 percent of lost customers hit the road not because of price or quality but
because they didn’t like the human side of doing business with the prior provider
of the product or service.
It seems fair to collapse the last two categories into one, after which we could say:



15 percent left because of quality problems
15 percent scooted because of price
70 percent hit the road because they didn’t like the human side of doing business with
the prior provider of the product or service.
Which brings us directly back to the impoverished old couple and their “small” gift of
attentiveness. In the age of email, supercomputer power on the desktop, the Internet, and
the raucous global village, attentiveness—a token of human kindness—is the greatest gift
we can give someone: anyone, including our American or Japanese or German customers
for paper clips, hand and cheese sandwiches, jet aircraft engines, or $10 million lines of
credit.
4.
Ellen Langer, a leading social psychologist, begins her book, Mindfulness, with a story
about elderly nursing home residents who were given houseplants to care for and allowed
to make some other minor decisions about their daily routine. “A year and a half later,”
she writes, “not only were [the plant minders] more cheerful, active, and alert than a
similar group in the same institution that were not given these choices and
responsibilities, but many more of them were still alive. In fact, less than half as many of
those decision-making, plant-minding residents had died as had those in the other group.”
What do nursing home residents have to do with business success? Everything. Langer
offers a dramatic tribute to the power of personal engagement. It was good for the plants;
it was even better for the people who got involved in their care. Well, people-nurturing
has two sides, too—one for the nurtured and another for the nurturer. The phone call, the
small courtesy, the warm words, are all modest acts of engagement that make customers
feel good. That may not extend your life, but it will surely boost your business and make
you feel a lot better about yourself—which, come to think of it, is probably a pretty good
life-extending therapy.
5.
Terry Neil, managing partner of Andersen Consulting’s worldwide change practice,
translates an old French saying as, “Change is a door that can only be opened from the
inside.” He buttresses this assertion with the philosophy of Notre Dame football coach
Lou Holtz, “It’s not my job to motivate players. They bring extraordinary motivation to
our program. It’s my job not to de-motivate them.”
Empowerment, Neill concludes, is not the things you do to or for people, it’s the
impediments you take away, leaving space for folks to empower themselves.
So what, exactly, have you done today to remove obstacles to success from the path of
the would-be heroes at the front line?
6.
Nothing is carved in stone. Nothing. Everything is written in sand and is likely to be
erased or unrecognizably altered by the next wave or wind that sweeps over it. With that
disclaimer out of the way, let me offer a few tentative truths that I’ve squeezed out of my
life’s adventure: