Tom Peters’
Excellence.
Always.
ExpoGestão/Joinville/19 June 2009
Slides at …
tompeters.com
Confronting the …
Empty Pocket!
“The doctor
interrupts
after …*
*Source: Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think
The four most important words in any organization
are …
“What do
you
think?”
Source: courtesy Dave Wheeler, posted at tompeters.com
“It was much later that I realized Dad’s
secret. He gained respect by giving it. He
talked and listened to the fourth-grade kids
in Spring Valley who shined shoes the same
way he talked and listened to a bishop or a
He was
seriously interested in
who you were and
what you had to say.”
college president.
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect
“People want to be part of
something larger than
themselves. They want to be
part of something they’re
really proud of, that they’ll
fight for, sacrifice for ,
trust.”
—Howard Schultz, Starbucks (IBD/09.05)
Conrad Hilton, at a gala
celebrating his career,
was asked, “What was the
most important lesson
you’ve learned in you long
and distinguished career?”
His immediate answer …
“remember
to tuck the
shower curtain
inside the
bathtub”
“Execution
is
strategy.”
—Fred Malek
John Sawhill/Major Strategic
“What areas should
the Conservancy focus on
and more important—
Initiative:
what activities
should we stop
doing?”
Source: Bill Birchard, Nature’s Keepers: The Remarkable Story of How The Nature
Conservancy Became the Largest Environmental Organization in the World
Listen!
Engage!
Respect!
Inspire!
Sweat the details!
Execute!
Focus!
“To me business isn’t about
wearing suits or pleasing
stockholders. It’s about
being true to yourself,
your ideas and focusing on
the essentials.” —Richard Branson
Bonus:
New Delhi
“The ONE Question”: “In the last year [3 years,
current job], name the three people whose
growth you’ve most contributed to. Please
explain where they were at the beginning of the
year, where they are today, and where they are
heading in the next 12 months. Please explain
your development strategy in each case. Please
tell me your biggest development
disappointment—looking back, could you or
would you have done anything differently?
Please tell me about your greatest development
triumph—and disaster—in the last ten years.
What are the ‘three big things’ you’ve learned
about helping people grow along the way.”
Part
ONE
1977
Palo Alto
MBWA
1982
Excellence1982: The Bedrock “Eight Basics”
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
A Bias for Action
Close to the Customer
Autonomy and Entrepreneurship
Productivity Through People
Hands On, Value-Driven
Stick to the Knitting
Simple Form, Lean Staff
Simultaneous Loose-Tight
Properties”
“Breakthrough” 82*
People!
Customers!
Action!
Values!
*In Search of Excellence
Hard Is Soft
Soft Is Hard
Hard Is Soft (Plans, #s)
Soft Is Hard (people,
customers, values,
relationships))
Bonus:
5X
none!
139,380 former
patients from 225 hospitals:
Press Ganey Assoc:
none
of THE top 15 factors
determining Patient Satisfaction
referred to patient’s health outcome
P.S. directly related to Staff Interaction
P.P.S. directly correlated with Employee
Satisfaction
Source: Putting Patients First, Susan Frampton, Laura Gilpin, Patrick Charmel
“Kindness
is free.”
“There is a misconception that supportive interactions require
more staff or more time and are therefore more costly. Although
labor costs are a substantial part of any hospital budget, the
interactions themselves add nothing to the budget.
Kindness is
free.
Listening to patients or answering their
questions costs nothing. It can be argued that negative
interactions—alienating patients, being non-responsive to their
needs or limiting their sense of control—can be very costly. …
Angry, frustrated or frightened patients may be combative,
withdrawn and less cooperative—requiring far more time
than it would have taken to interact with them initially in a
positive way.” —Putting Patients First, Susan Frampton,
Laura Gilpin, Patrick Charmel
“Courtesies of a small and
trivial character are the
ones which strike
deepest in the grateful
and appreciating heart.”
—Henry Clay
Acquire vs maintain*:
*Recession goal: Higher “market share” current customers
2007
Siberia
Why in the
World did you
go to Siberia?
An emotional,
vital, innovative, joyful, creative,
entrepreneurial endeavor that
elicits maximum
Enterprise* ** (*at its best):
concerted human potential
in the wholehearted service
of others.**
**Employees, Customers, Suppliers, Communities, Owners, Temporary
partners
2007
Sydney
Organizations exist
to serve. Period.
Leaders live to
serve. Period.
… no less than
Cathedrals
in which the full and
awesome power of the
Imagination and Spirit and
native Entrepreneurial flair
of diverse individuals is
unleashed in passionate
pursuit of … Excellence.
“We are a
‘Life Success’
Company.”
Dave Liniger, founder, RE/MAX
“The role of the Director is to create a
space where the actors and
become more
than they’ve ever been
before, more than
they’ve dreamed of
being.”
actresses can
—Robert Altman, Oscar acceptance speech
Our Mission
To develop and manage talent;
to apply that talent,
throughout the world,
for the benefit of clients;
to do so in partnership;
to do so with profit.
WPP
Spring 2009
Amsterdam
Helsinki
Tallinn
Vilnius
San Antonio
Bogotá
Abu Dhabi
Shanghai
Seoul
New Delhi
Good News 2009:
Leadership*
is a sacred
trust.
*President, classroom teacher, CEO, shop foreman
“Too Much Cost, Not Enough Value” … “Too
Much Speculation, Not Enough Investment” …
“Too Much Complexity, Not Enough Simplicity”
… “Too Much Counting, Not Enough Trust” …
“Too Much Business Conduct, Not Enough
Professional Conduct” … “Too Much
Salesmanship, Not Enough Stewardship” …
“Too Much Focus on Things, Not Enough Focus
on Commitment” … “Too Many Twenty-first
Century Values, Not Enough EighteenthCentury Values” … “Too Much ‘Success,’ Not
Enough Character”
—chapter titles from John Bogle,
Enough. The Measures of Money, Business, and Life (Bogle is
founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund Group)
“Business has to give
people enriching,
rewarding lives,
or it's simply not
worth doing.”
—Richard Branson
Part
TWO
The …
Innovation 24
Tom Peters/Joinville/19 June 2009
Base
Case
“I am often asked by would-be entrepreneurs
seeking escape from life within huge corporate
structures, ‘How do I build a small firm for
Buy
a very large one
and just wait.”
myself?’ The answer seems obvious:
—Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail:
Evolution, Extinction and Economics
“Mr. Foster and his McKinsey colleagues
collected detailed performance data stretching
back
40 years for 1,000
They found that
U.S. companies.
none
of
the long-term survivors managed to
outperform the market. Worse, the
longer companies had been in the
database, the worse they did.”
—Financial Times
You don’t
get better
by being
bigger. You
Dick Kovacevich:
“Data drawn from the real world
attest to a fact that is beyond
Everything
in existence tends
to deteriorate.”
our control:
—Norberto Odebrecht, Education Through Work
#4 Japan
#2T USA
#2T China
#4 Japan
#3 USA
#2 China
#1 Germany
Reason!!!
Mittelstand
Jim Penman/
Jim’s Group
Jim’s Mowing Canada
Jim’s Mowing UK
Jim’s Antennas
Jim’s Bookkeeping
Jim’s Building Maintenance
Jim’s Carpet Cleaning
Jim’s Car Cleaning
Jim’s Computer Services
Jim’s Dog Wash
Jim’s Driving School
Jim’s Fencing
Jim’s Floors
Jim’s Painting
Jim’s Paving
Jim’s Pergolas [gazebos]
Jim’s Pool Care
Jim’s Pressure Cleaning
Jim’s Roofing
Jim’s Security Doors
Jim’s Trees
Jim’s Window Cleaning
Jim’s Windscreens
Note: Download, free, Jim Penman’s book:
What Will They Franchise Next? The Story of Jim’s Group
TACTICS
X =XFX*
*Excellence = Cross-functional Excellence
Never
waste a
lunch!
????
% XF
lunches*
*Measure!
(Way) Underutilized Lever
Space!
Space!
Space!
Space!
Geologists +
Geophysicists +
A little bit of love =
Oil
>100 feet =
100 miles
The
quality and quantity
and imaginativeness
of innovation shall
be the same in all
functions —e.g., in HR and
Iron Innovation Equality Law:
purchasing as much as in marketing or
product development.
“We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were
omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the
software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again
and again. We do the same today. While our competitors
are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design
perfect, we’re already on prototype version
#5.
By the time our rivals are
ready with wires and screws, we are on version
#10. It gets back to planning
versus acting: We act from day
one; others plan how to plan—
for months.” —Bloomberg by Bloomberg
Culture of Prototyping
“Effective prototyping may
the most
valuable core
competence an
be
innovative organization can
hope to have.” —Michael Schrage
“Fail .
Forward.
Fast.”
High Tech CEO, Pennsylvania
“The secret of fast
progress is
inefficiency, fast
and furious and
numerous failures.”
—Kevin Kelly
Little =
Bank
7X.
7:30A-8:00P.
F12A.
7:30AM = 7:15AM.
8:00PM = 8:15PM.
Bonus:
Disney
BEGINS
(and ENDS)
It
in the …
parking
lot*
*Disney
“Experiences
are as distinct
from services as
services are from
goods.”
—Joe Pine & Jim Gilmore, The
Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a
Stage
2,000,000
<TGW
and …
>TGR
[Things Gone WRONG-Things Gone RIGHT]
Snack
Foods
Bag sizes = New markets:
Source: PepsiCo
High
Value
Items
Big carts =
Source: Wal*Mart
Life and
Death
Socks =
10,000
We are the
company
we keep
“You will become
like the five people
you associate with
the most …
this can be either a blessing or a curse.”
—Billy Cox
The “We are what we eat”
axiom: At its core, every (!!!)
relationship-partnership
decision (employee, vendor,
customer, etc) is a strategic
decision about:
“Innovate,
‘Yes’ or ‘No’ ”
Measure “Strangeness”/Portfolio Quality
Staff
Consultants
Vendors
Out-sourcing Partners (#, Quality)
Innovation Alliance Partners
Customers
Competitors (who we “benchmark” against)
Strategic Initiatives
Product Portfolio (LineEx v. Leap)
IS/IT Projects
HQ Location
Lunch Mates
Language
Board
“Diverse groups of problem solvers—groups
of people with diverse tools—consistently
outperformed groups of the best and the
brightest. If I formed two groups, one
random (and therefore diverse) and one
consisting of the best individual performers,
the first group almost always did better. …
Diversity trumped
ability.”
—Scott Page, The Difference: How
the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups,
Firms, Schools, and Societies Diversity
“The
Bottleneck Is at
the Top of the Bottle”
“Where are you likely to find people with the least diversity of
experience, the largest investment in the past, and the greatest
reverence for industry dogma:
At the top!”
— Gary Hamel/Harvard Business Review
“Forget China,
India and the
Internet: Economic
Growth Is Driven
by
Women.”
Source: Headline, Economist
“Women are
the majority
market”
—Fara Warner/The Power of the Purse
“AS LEADERS,
WOMEN
RULE:
New Studies find that
female managers outshine their male
counterparts in almost every measure”
TITLE/ Special Report/ BusinessWeek
94%
of loans to …
women*
*Microlending; “Banker to the poor”; Grameen Bank;
Muhammad Yunus; 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner
“CEMEX realized that women
are the key drivers of savings
in [Mexican] families. … They are
entrepreneurial in nature, and they actively
participate in the tanda system [neighborhood groups who
pool money and save any that’s left over]. Regardless of
whether they are homemakers or outside-the-home
workers, they are responsible for any savings in the
family. Patrimonio Hoy [Private Property Today, a CEMEX
program to aid the poor in building homes] discovered that
70% of the women who saved were saving money in
the tanda system to construct homes for their
families. The men in the society consider their job
done if they bring in their paycheck at the end of the
day.” —C.K. Prahalad, from The Fortune at the Bottom of
the Pyramid, on Lorenzo Zambrano and CEMEX, the Mexican
company that’s the world’s #3 cement maker
“One thing is certain: Women’s rise to power, which is
linked to the increase in wealth per capita, is happening
in all domains and at all levels of society. Women are no
longer content to provide efficient labor or to be
consumers with rising budgets and more autonomy to
spend. … This is just the beginning. The phenomenon
will only grow as girls prove to be more successful than
For a number of
observers, we have already
entered the age of
‘womenomics,’ the economy as
thought out and practiced
by a woman.” —Aude Zieseniss de Thuin, Financial
boys in the school system.
Times, 10.03.2006
10 UNASSAILABLE REASONS WOMEN RULE
Women make [all] the financial decisions.
Women control [all] the wealth.
Women [substantially] outlive men.
Women start most of the new businesses.
Women’s work force participation rates have
soared worldwide.
Women are closing in on “same pay for same
job.”
Women are penetrating senior ranks rapidly
[even if the pace is slow for the corner
office per se].
Women’s leadership strengths are exceptionally well
aligned with new organizational effectiveness
imperatives.
Women are better salespersons than men.
Women buy [almost] everything—commercial
as well as consumer goods.
So what exactly is the point of men?
The …
Innovation 24
Tom Peters/JOINVILLE/19 June 2009
Innovation 24
**XFX/Cross-functional excellence (physical, lunch,
project structure, transparency, “emergent
leadership,” “facebook,” etc)
**Prototype mania (“action bias,” “serious play,” “most
tries wins,” “execution is strategy”)
**Portfolio management (Score every project)
**Celebrate failures (“most mistakes wins,”
“Fail. Forward. Fast.”, mining pissed off customers)
**Decentralization (“attitude,” budgetary control/30%
to 80%, accountability, “spontaneous discovery
process”)
**Centralization (once in a blue moon—“culture
change”/HP-Fiorina; “Centers of Excellence”-GSK)
**Targeted-small acquisitions (need a strong retention
process)
**Alternate structures (“Skunkworks,” 1% “play
money,” “parallel universe,” internal “venture funds,”
partnership with lead vendors-customers,
“adhocracy” in general)
Innovation 24
**Weed the portfolio (Wave “bye-bye” to old friends,
mastering “organizational forgetting”)
**Acknowledge-revel in the mess (logic behind “try it”
culture, champion inefficiency)
**Fight for simplicity, war on complexity (Drucker: “90%
of what we call ‘management, consists …”)
**“We are what we eat”/ “hang out factor” (lead
customers, vendors, board, consultants, diversity
per se, mentor “freaks,” “crowdsourcing”—carefully
managed!)
**R&D equal all functions (e.g. systems innovation = new
product innovation)
**100% innovators (“What do you think?”, “culture” of
respect, HR’s lead role)
**Practice “nudgery” (bigger cart, +50% purchases)
**“Gandhi’s rule” (“You must be the change you wish to
see in the world,” “timid begets timid”)
Innovation 24
**Diverse “team at the top”!
**“Enthusiasm ‘machine’” (“I am a dispenser of
enthusiasm,” extreme language-“insanely great”)
**Passion for “cool” (“design mindfulness”)
**MBWA (Managing By Wandering Around—in touch with
the “coal face”)
**Women (“the market,” not a “market segment;”
micro-lending/Yunus-Cemex)
**“Boring” as well as/more than “sexy” (Jim’s Group,
Basement Systems Inc)
**Big stinks/SMEs rule (Mittelstand, Foster’s stats:
0 for 1,000)
**Infrastructure (e.g., research universities, venture
capital, national initiatives such as Korea and design,
primary education)
Part
THREE
Forty-four “Secrets”
and “clever Strategies”
For dealing with the
Recession of 2008-XXXX
Tom Peters/VILNIUS/0326.09
44 “Secrets” and “Clever Strategies” For
Dealing with the Recession of 2008-XXXX
You come earlier.
You leave later.
You work harder.
You may well work for less; and, if so, you
adapt to the untoward circumstances with a
smile—even if it kills you inside.
You volunteer to do more.
You dig deep and always bring a good attitude
to work.
You fake it if your good attitude flags.
You literally practice your "game face" in the
mirror in the morning, and in the loo
mid-morning.
You give new meaning to the idea and intensive
practice of “visible management.”
44 “Secrets” and “Clever Strategies” For
Dealing with the Recession of 2008-XXXX
You take better than usual care of yourself and
encourage others to do the same—physical
well-being determines mental well-being and
response to stress.
You shrug off shit that flows downhill in your
direction—buy a shovel or a “pre-worn”
raincoat on eBay.
You try to forget about “the good old days”—
nostalgia is self-destructive.
You buck yourself up with the thought that
“this too shall pass”—but then remind yourself
that it might not pass any time soon, and so
you re-dedicate yourself to making the
absolute best of what you have now.
44 “Secrets” and “Clever Strategies” For
Dealing with the Recession of 2008-XXXX
You work the phones and then work the
phones some more—and stay in touch with
positively everyone.
You frequently invent breaks from routine,
including “weird” ones—“changeups” prevent
wallowing and bring a fresh perspective.
You eschew all forms of personal excess.
You simplify.
You sweat the details as never before.
You sweat the details as never before.
You sweat the details as never before.
You raise to the sky and maintain at all
costs the Standards of Excellence by which
you unfailingly evaluate your own performance.
You are maniacal when it comes to responding
to even the slightest screw-up.
44 “Secrets” and “Clever Strategies” For
Dealing with the Recession of 2008-XXXX
You find ways to be around young people and
to keep young people around—they are less
likely to be members of the “sky is falling”
school.
You learn new tricks of your trade.
You remind yourself that this is not just
something to be “gotten through”—it is the
Final Exam of character.
You network like a demon.
You network inside the company—get to know
more of the folks who “do the real work.”
You network outside the company—get to
know more of the folks who “do the real
work” in vendor-customer outfits.
44 “Secrets” and “Clever Strategies” For
Dealing with the Recession of 2008-XXXX
You thank others by the truckload if good
things happen—and take the heat yourself if
bad things happen.
You behave kindly, but you don't sugarcoat or
hide the truth--humans are startlingly
resilient and rumors are the real killers.
You treat small successes as if they were
Super bowl victories—and celebrate and
commend accordingly.
You shrug off the losses (ignoring what's going
on in your tummy), and get back on the
horse and immediately try again.
You avoid negative people to the extent you
can—pollution kills.
You eventually read the gloom-sprayers the
riot act.
44 “Secrets” and “Clever Strategies” For
Dealing with the Recession of 2008-XXXX
You give new meaning to the word "thoughtful.“
You don’t put limits on the flowers budget—
“bright and colorful” works marvels.
You redouble, re-triple your efforts to "walk in
your customer's shoes." (Especially if the
shoes smell.)
You mind your manners—and accept others’
lack of manners in the face of their strains.
You are kind to all mankind.
You keep your shoes shined.
You leave the blame game at the office door.
You call out the congenital politicians in no
uncertain terms.
You become a paragon of personal accountability.
And then you pray.
Part
FOUR
“Excellence can be obtained if you:
... care more than others think is wise;
... risk more than others think is safe;
... dream more than others think
is practical;
... expect more than others think
is possible.”
Source: Anon. (Posted @ tompeters.com by
K.Sriram, November 27, 2006 1:17 AM)
Excellence.
Always.