Archives: July 2014

Some Stuff
Tweets
18 July 2014

Brief snippets FYI …

Topic ONE: Generational management.

I’m sick-to-death of the “How do we manage ‘Gen Whatever'” bullshit. My response thereto:

As leader, commit yourself fully to helping everyone grow every day. Gen A. Gen B. … Gen X. Gen Y. Gen Z. Nothing new. Damn it.

People you work with can smell your (leader’s) passion for helping them grow. Or the absence thereof. Demographics be damned.

Topic TWO: “Helping.”

“Helping” is more delicate than neurosurgery, so half (three-quarters? 90%?) of the time we’re helping, in fact we’re hindering. (That’s NOT glib.)

Thought of the day: “Helping” is the most delicate act there is. (THE MOST DELICATE.) Most managers—newbies or seasoned, especially seasoned—think they understand how to help. They are delusional X10.

“Helping” is an area of intense-committed-sustained professional study—not “instinctive” or “seat of the pants” or “old wives’ tales.”

Effective-attuned listening is the heart of helping. “Listening” is an area of professional study—not seat of the pants or old wives’ tales.

Topic THREE: Selling.

Selling is 80% listening. (Not clear what the other 20% is.)

Hypothesis: Often as not/more often than not INTROVERTS make the best salespeople.

(Re introverts: Persistence and aggressiveness do not require making noise.)

Topic FOUR: Nurturing creativity in yourself.

Best way—bar none—to stay creative is to manage “hang out.” RELIGIOUSLY. Hang out with weirdos (on any and all dimensions) rather than “same old, same old” and you automatically win.

The “smartest person in the room” is the one who (KEEPS HIS OR HER MOUTH SHUT) and learns from everyone else in the room.

Detroit

Sculpture of Joe Lewis Fist, Detroit

Did you see the recent article, “The Post-Post-Apocolyptic Detroit”? Before I met Tom Peters, I lived in Detroit. My husband had an idyllic, cookie-cutter suburban ’60s upbringing there with a family full of auto workers. All his grandparents were immigrants, happy to see their children thrive in post-WWII Detroit. He spent the ’80s in downtown Detroit, in college and working at the Stroh Brewery. Detroit was already in decline when I arrived in the ’90s.

What I found was a population baffled by their misfortune. Why was manufacturing more cars not the solution to their economic woes? Assembling cars had created a healthy middle class and glamorous city. But the industry changed. This community of builders, in love with the cars they built, were no longer able to prosper. Ruin, on a massive scale, ensued.

For an overview of the desolation, take author James Howard Kunstler’s Google Street Views tour of the Detroit cityscape.

Detroit’s decline has lasted for so long that its reputation is rough, scarred, brutal. As a young, white woman in the ’90s I was advised by many not to go downtown alone. Kunstler states while visiting Detroit he had to stay in another country for safety (Windsor, Ontario, across the river). That was not my experience. I found boundless creativity. In some of the most dangerous areas, there were community art fairs, neighborhood art projects (most notably the Heidelberg Project, shown below), and a vibrant music scene. That is not to say that Detroit is a safe place. It’s not. But those who have stayed either don’t have the ability to leave or have been brave enough to believe that things will improve. Knowing Detroiters as I do, I’d say they will not go down without a fight.

Detroit's Heidelberg Project

The “Post-Post-Apocolyptic Detroit” article features the stories of some of those who are brave enough to not only stay, but invest heavily in the future of this once-great city. Dan Gilbert, billionaire owner of Quicken Loans, seems to be investing the most.

Detroit is his mission; he has gone all-in. He has brought 12,500 employees with him to downtown, … is funding the construction of a light-rail system … formed a start-up incubator called Bizdom and a venture-capital firm … He told me: “Here, man, oh, man, it’s a dream. Anything can be created in Detroit.”

Gilbert, a Detroiter by birth and an entrepreneur by nature, happened upon some very good advice early in his career:

After starting his first company, Rock Financial, he fell under the sway of the Thomas J. Peters business tome In Search of Excellence and became fixated on the idea of creating a positive corporate culture.*

Longtime readers of Tom’s work recognize that profit isn’t always the result of greed, his favorite equation being, “Kindness=Repeat Business=Profit.” Dan Gilbert is trying to “enrich a city and himself at the same time,” believing that you can “do well by doing good.”

I, for one, hope that Dan and Tom are right. As the article points out,

If the scale of Detroit’s failure is unprecedented, then so (the local reasoning goes) is the scale of its opportunity.

Whether the locals are right or not about the size of the opportunity and its likelihood of success, the more who act on Tom’s equation, the better off Detroit will be.

*[Postscript: Upon reading Dan Gilbert’s comment, Tom wrote, “I am flattered beyond measure and never cease to be amazed by commentary like this. Makes a dent in the cumulative weariness from millions of air miles.”]

“Mastery”
Total Real Estate Training
Annual Education Conference
Sydney, 15-16 July 2014

Tom is addressing a group of the most successful realtors in Australia and New Zealand. He and Rupert Murdoch are the principal keynoters. (Mr. Murdoch is in town to, among other things, celebrate the 50th anniversary—15 July—of the launch of his national newspaper, the Australian.)

“The pattern is one I’m familiar with,” Tom says of the audience. “They are exceptionally attentive. Every one is wildly successful and doesn’t need this; but those are precisely the folks who are perpetually hungry to pick up even the tiniest idea that might help them take their game up another notch.”

If you would like to get the PPT presentations from the event, it is available here. Note: Three PPTs posted on 15 July (Session One, Session Two, and the Long Version) have been replaced by one combined PPT on 18 July:

Sydney, Sessions One and Two, 15-16 July

Excellence. NO EXCUSES! Update

Tom has continued to tinker with his now super-sized document, Excellence. NO EXCUSES! He asked the opinion of his Twitter followers, and they approved the addition of “Moral Bedrock of Management,” available here. It is now item number 6 in this latest version of Excellence. NO EXCUSES!

We encourage you to download it, or one of its chapters. Ponder it, use it, spread it around. And if you would like to read the story behind it, you can find that here.

New Master Slideset

After a year of self-education, Tom has lots of new observations to include in his Master slides. Get the newest PPT here, or on excellencenow.com.