NOTE: To appreciate this presentation
[and ensure that it is not a mess
], you need
Microsoft fonts:
“Showcard Gothic,”
“Ravie,” “Chiller” and “Verdana”

The magic number 25.
Mbwa.
Calendars never lie.
Excellence.
Always.
Tom Peters/0709.07

*Damn near true

Though his empire is enormous, and his executive team strong, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz still … religiously … visits at least 25 S’bucks shops … per week!
“Regardless of our size,” he told me,
“we still sell it one-cup-at-a-time, one customer-at-a-time, one server-ata-time. I need to see it and touch it and feel it.”

MBWA *
*5,000 miles for a 5-minute face-to
-face meeting (courtesy superagent Mark McCormick)

When Bob Waterman and I wrote In Search of
Excellence in 1982, business was “by the numbers”—and the Americans were struggling (to put it mildly) with hands on, tactile stuff, like
Japanese quality. Then, at Hewlett Packard, we were introduced to the famed “HP Way,” the centerpiece of which was in-touch management. HP had a term for this … MBWA.
(Managing By
Wandering Around.)
Bob and I fell in immediate love. Not only was the idea per se important and cool, but it symbolized everything we were coming to cherish —enterprises where bossesleaders were in immediate touch with and emotionally attached to workers, customers, the product. The idea is as important or more important in fast-paced 2007 as it was in 1982.

—Craig Johnson/30 yrs

Craig Johnson, a famed Venture
Capitalist for three decades … refuses to invest in companies that are more than a 20-minute drive from his office.
To guide them through the serpentine path ahead, he insists that he must be in constant touch as banker, advisor, friend.

*Hank Paulson, China visits, Fortune 1127.06
*

China is clearly our most important economic partner. Our dialog with
China was not what it might have been when Hank Paulson took over as
Secretary of the Treasury. Immediate improvement occurred for numerous reasons, not least of which were
Paulson’s SEVENTY TRIPS to
China while at Goldman Sachs.

[in the first week of the year]
—Hank Paulson, former CEO, Goldman Sachs
Source: Fortune , “Secrets of Greatness,” 0320.05

MBWA, Grameen Style!
“Conventional banks ask their clients to come to their office. It’s a terrifying place for the poor and illiterate. … The entire Grameen Bank system runs on the principle that people should not come to the bank, the bank should go to the people.
… If any staff member is seen in the office, it should be taken as a violation of the rules of the Grameen Bank.
… It is essential that [those setting up a new village Branch] have no office and no place to stay. The reason is to make us as different as possible from government officials
.”
Source: Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor

be
Gandhi

—David D’Alessandro, Career Warfare

*
*Calendars
lie

All we have is our time. The way we spend our time is our priorities, is our
“strategy.” Your calendar knows what you really care about. Do you?

—Manny Garcia

“All this” [this little riff] is indeed, as seminar participant and leading Burger King franchisee Manny Garcia once said to me,
“obvious.” * But observation over four decades ** suggests that amidst the hubbub and travails of a typical day’s work, the socalled obvious is often-usually left unattended. For perfectly good reasons, another week passes without a visit to our equivalent of the Starbucks shops or HP R&D labs, without the equivalent to
Hank Paulsen’s “How ya doin’?” call to a key customer. My [Tom
Peters] Job One in life? Remind busy folks of the obvious!
* Manny Garcia/1983: “Tom, I hope you won’t be insulted when I say this was the best seminar I’ve ever been to—and it was a blinding flash of the obvious.”
** I had two commanding officers during my two Vietnam tours in
U.S. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion NINE. One was a Shultz look-alike —instinctively in the field. The other was an in the office
“leader.” The one produced. The other didn’t. At age 24 I learned an incredible life lesson, though I couldn’t describe it well until tripping over HP’s MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around.