Free Stuff
This is what Tom calls “Recession46: Forty-six ‘Secrets’ and ‘Clever Strategies’ For Dealing with the Recession of 2008-XXXX.” It’s part of a collection titled “Tom Peters’ Thoughts About Getting Things Done, in Good Times and Bad,” and we offer it to you here as a stand-alone. At only two pages long, it is a tidy, handy list of counterintuitive thoughts on handling the current financial downturn.
A speech in New Delhi co-sponsored by the American Society for Quality led me to concoct this list. I have always had a broad view of “quality,” and decided to let my mind and keyboard go where they would. Resulting in “Quality & Excellence: The Quality 136—One Hundred Thirty-six Random Thoughts on Quality, Emphasizing the Elements That Are Often Missing in Conventional Quality Programs.”
We usually think of business strategy as some sort of aspirational market positioning statement. Doubtless that’s part of it. But I believe that the number one “strategic strength” is excellence in execution and systemic relationships (i.e., with everyone we come in contact with). Hence I offer 48 [now 56! 01 April 2009] pieces of advice for creating a winning strategy that is inherently sustainable.
Recession or no recession, deep recession or not, the challenge to add more and more value grows, and the importance of innovation, and a culture of innovation, grows exponentially. A “culture of innovation” covers “everything.” There is no half way. There of course are “first principles.” Or are there? I started a list of “stuff” that’s imperative to creating an innovative enterprise. The list of 10 or so grew to 25, than 45, and at the moment includes no less than 121 “tactics.” Of course you can’t do all of them. Or must you? Well, you can’t do all 121, or maybe even half that number, or less, but the absence of any one or two or three or six weakens and perhaps even imperils the entire structure; that is, we are talking overall about an abiding “culture of innovation,” and it takes a thousand signals roughly aligned to establish it and, especially, keep it in place.
“Real People” is the shorthand title for what Tom calls “Excellence for the Rest of Us: A Book for Real People, Working in the Real World in 2008.” In this manifesto, Tom contrasts the thinking of gurus (like him!) to the thinking of the rest of us … those who toil in more conventional settings. In Search of Excellence introduces this idea when Tom and Bob Waterman write, “Hard is Soft. Soft is Hard.” By that phrase, they are referring to the people things, the soft stuff that’s more difficult than the numbers game of business. Tom revisits and expands on this thinking in “Real People.”
We’re re-issuing this column as a holiday offering from tompeters.com. Tom wrote it once upon a time for his column syndicated by the Chicago Tribune, but we think its lessons are timeless. And, what better way for us to recognize the holiday season than to post this article—”Lessons About Life & Enterprise from Baking Christmas Cookies.”
Tom introduced this collection as his effort to get you to pay “’strategic’ attention to what has always been Issue #1 in organizational effectiveness … from Napoleon to the man in the moon.” Namely, cross-functional effectiveness, which will help you “‘Deliver Speed,’ ‘Service Excellence,’ and ‘Value-added Customer Solutions.’”
The Top 50 Have You [done these things in the last week, day, hour?] list is Tom’s reaction to the phrase “Mapping Your Competitive Position.” He contends that you should, instead, put some effort to the tasks on his list. In his estimation, they’re important to the short- and long-term health of any enterprise, big or small. If so, the mapping will become a secondary issue.
Further ruminations on the ideas that led Tom to his “Purpose” screed, below, resulted in this offering—his attempt to lay out the “big stuff.” He introduced this rambling piece in a blog titled “To Get Out of Bed. Or Not Get Out of Bed. That Is the Question.” You can find Tom’s answer in this PDF, “Organizations Serve.”
As the 25th birthday of In Search of Excellence approaches, Tom has been pondering what the practice of management is all about—good, bad, or indifferent. He concluded that entrepreneurial capitalism is the strongest force possible for unleashing human potential, and that it depends upon the effective practice of management. And, according to a review of Thriving on Chaos, “Effective management is management that delivers more value to customers and more opportunity for service, creativity, and growth to workers. … The decent thing to do is also the smart thing.” That is, effective management is humanistic management.
After a lot of thought on these matters, Tom came up with this attempt to answer the perennial question, “What’s it all about, Alfie?”
