Category: People

Coming November 1st

Tom’s new book, Tom Peters’ Compact Guide to Excellence, will be published November 1st! Tom partnered with iconic designer Nancye Green of Donovan/Green to create this leadership guidebook. They packed the strikingly designed little book with exhilarating quotes that will urge you to recognize what truly matters at work.

We look for people that are warm and caring and actually altruistic. We look for people who have a fun-loving attitude.”

Colleen Barrett, President Emeritus, Southwest Airlines

Being aware of yourself and how you affect everyone around you is what distinguishes a superior leader.”

Cindy Miller, with Edie Seashore, in Sally Helgesen’s “Masters of the Breakthrough Moment,” strategy + business

Better before cheaper. Revenue before cost. There are no other rules.”

Michael E. Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed, The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think

These are just a couple of quotes from the guidebook. Over the decades, Tom has gathered these gems of wisdom from those down in the trenches creating extraordinary places to work. The insights you’ll find in Tom Peters’ Compact Guide to Excellence will move you to action, to vigorously and passionately support our communities, provide products and services that stun your clientele with their excellence and verve, and serve our ailing planet. It’s not just the best path forward, it’s the path that can engender purpose and pride in all of us who perform the work.

Nancye designed the book for you, the reader, keeping in mind the most accessible and captivating way to absorb the wisdom. This book is meant to be picked up when you’re in need of inspiration. It provides you a framework for how to think about the way you act, the way you live, the way you govern your relationships with others.

We are all in need of some inspiration from time to time. Take this guidebook with you wherever you need to be reminded of excellence.

Pre-Order Now

The Moral Responsibility of Enterprise: Credo 2021

Most of us spend the best parts of our waking hours in a business with 1 to 100,001 fellow employees. Business, therefore, is not “part of the community.” Business is the community. Hence, the “first order of business” for any enterprise is its ongoing moral responsibility to all of those who make its success possible: employees, in terms of their personal growth, and social equity as regards gender and race. This also includes the communities in which its employees lives as well as the larger communities where the enterprise does business: city, state, country, planet.

And as to output—what business delivers to its employees, its communities, and its customers—it holds a sacred obligation to create products and services that, as Jony Ive (Apple’s former design leader), says, “serve humanity first.”

Regarding traditional business goals, such as unwavering commitment to excellence and to people and community are the only repeatedly proven long-term drivers of exceptional growth and profitability. Looking down the road, developing the full potential of its people and providing products and services that inspire offer the best chance we have to continue to provide enlightened and humane contributions that the looming artificial intelligence tsunami cannot take away from us.

Course 2: People (REALLY) First—OUT NOW

Take care of people. Train them and train them and train them and treat them with kindness and respect and help them prepare for tomorrow. Insist that every employee commit to growth and care for their mates (this goes double—or triple—in today’s troubled times). Goal: Extreme Employee Engagement (E3). Bottom line: make Excellence the norm in all people matters.

That’s it.

This course looks at the “people (what- the-hell-else-is-there?) issue” through eleven different lenses—that is, eleven steps. My goal is to inflame (!) your desire (!) to work harder (!) and more creatively (!) on the “people stuff”—and to provide you with practical (ready- to-use-today) approaches to doing so.

VIEW COURSE 2 NOW

The Excellence Dividend
April 2018-May 2019

The Excellence Dividend was published in early 2018. I have not been entirely idle in the subsequent 13 months. Herewith you will find a collection of 12 papers that have seen the light of day during those 13 months. They are offered up here for your use. (Or not.)

The Excellence Dividend: The Eighteen “Number Ones”
(Investment #1: TRAINING/Asset #1: PORTFOLIO OF FIRST-LINE MANAGERS/Core Value #1: LISTENING EXCELLENCE!!!/Obsession #1: EXECUTION/”THE LAST 95%”/Job #1: ESTABLISHING/MAINTAINING “60/60/24/7/365” A CULTURE OF EXCELLENCE-BY-PUTTING-PEOPLE-REALLY-FIRST [Plus 13 others])

25 Rules

Agenda 2019/20: Basic Tenets
(Re-Imagine Employee Engagement and Growth/Re-Imagine Business Per Se/Re-Imagine Business Education and the MBA)

EEE/Extreme Employee Engagement
(“Business has to give people enriching, rewarding lives … or it’s simply not worth doing.”—Richard Branson/“The role of the Director is to create a space where the actors and actresses can become more than they have ever been before, more than they’ve dreamed of being.”—Robert Altman)

Excellence Dividend FUNDAMENTALS
(PowerPoint/820 slides/13 chapters/Heavily Annotated)

The Excellence Dividend/Nine Observations
(In Search of Excellence in Six Words and eight others)

HARD IS SOFT. SOFT IS HARD.
(“Hard [plans, numbers, org charts] is soft. Soft [people, relationships, culture] is hard.”/GOOGLE GETS A [B-I-G] [S-O-F-T] SURPRISE)

Manifesto/Enterprise Excellence 2019
(EEE/EXTREME EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT/VISIBLE MORAL LEADERSHIP/A FULLTIME RESPONSIBILITY, NOT AN OPTION/HARD [NUMBERS/PLANS] IS SOFT. SOFT [RELATIONSHIPS/ CULTURE] IS HARD./EXTREME HUMANIZATION/PRODUCT-SERVICE DIFFERENTIATOR #1/EXCELLENCE IS THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES)

Maximizing Shareholder Value 1970-????: The Morally Bankrupt, Incomparably Destructive Economic and Social Idea That Decapitated Modern Business

Social Media: 28 Shorties

The Excellence Twenty: Success Lessons from The Excellence Dividend

Speed Trap: When Taking Your Time (Really) Matters
(BUILDING/MAINTAINING RELATIONSHIPS … take time./RECRUITING ALLIES TO YOUR CAUSE … takes time./BUILDING/MAINTAINING A HIGH-PERFORMANCE CULTURE … takes time./ READING/ STUDYING … take time./FIERCE/AGGRESSIVE LISTENING … takes [lots of!] time./MBWA/MANAGING BY WANDERING AROUND … takes time./SLACK IN YOUR SCHEDULE … takes time./HIRING-EVALUATING-PROMOTING … take time./THOUGHTFULNESS/INSTINCTIVE SMALL GESTURES (SMALL>>BIG) … take time./EXTREME HUMANIZATION-RADICAL HUMANIZATION … takes time./GAMECHANGING DESIGN [spending “hours and hours discussing corners”] … takes time./YOUR NEXT EMAIL … takes time./”THE LAST 1%” OF ANY TASK OR PROJECT … takes time./E-X-C-E-L-L-E-N-C-E … takes time.)

TEP/The Everything Paper+

I was exhausted last Friday afternoon. I’d not looked up for hours as I edited and re-edited and re-re-re-re-edited what I call “The Everything Paper.” I mean it! EVERYTHING … on one page (attached).* It’s a long story, but my mind has been racing and I have wanted to capture the main themes I intend to exclusively work on in the years to come—not in a new book, but on one page.

(*I have sort of cheated. The main document is a single page. But for illumination, I have added a page called “Case Study”; it focuses on Commerce Bank/Metro Bank, the poster child of The Excellence Dividend. It is representative of much of what I am discussing in TEP/The Everything Page. When I do a paper handout, TEP is printed on the front and the Commerce/Metro story is printed on the back—hence it technically remains one page!)

I call this one-pager “Agenda/Excellence 2019.” For several iterations I labeled it a “Manifesto.” But in the end that felt far too pretentious. And, hey, it is an “Agenda.” As you might expect, “Excellence” is in there too—it’s an even more important idea/state-of-mind/action item in 2019, with, in particular, technology most likely embarking on a job-destruction binge.

So you will be the judge. This one-pager has been through perhaps 100 drafts—no kidding.

It’s the best I can do.

(FYI: The first of ten points in the Agenda is about my hobbyhorse.2019: EEE/Extreme Employee Engagement. Hence I have included a second 1-pager, titled Extreme Employee Engagement.

(FYI: A special thanks to Zach First and Rick Wartzman at the Drucker Institute for pushing my thinking several steps forward—especially on the topic of the damage done by the dreadful Maximizing Shareholder Value “movement.”)

Attachments
Agenda/Excellence 2019 (one page)
Agenda/Excellence plus Metro Bank
Extreme Employee Engagement
EIGHTEEN Number Ones

EVERYTHING!
(Again.)

In New Zealand for another three weeks. But I’m heading to Perth next week to speak to the Australian Institute of Management WA (Western Australia). I’m putting together an up-to-date “Master” presentation which summarizes my thinking as honed in the past couple of months, particularly last week when I was at the University of Auckland Business School, speaking to a w-i-d-e variety of groups.

So this compact (“only” 269 slides) presentation is an SOE/Summary Of Everything as of Feb-March 2019.

In particular I single out my two big newish themes: “E-Cubed”/Extreme Employee Engagement and Extreme Humanization. The big idea is that to contend with the AI tsunami we have to double down on employee development rather than use tech to promiscuously cut jobs. And we have to double down on adding the human touches which make a customer interaction memorable as well as effective. Here’s the way I put it in one slide, based on my friends at Metro Bank in the UK:

Thrill customers (turn them into loyal message-spreading ‘Fans’) AND create good jobs AND earn big bucks AND embarrass the tech-gaga/cost-cutting-obsessed/short-term-shareholder-maximizing narrow-minded-job-and-sustainability-destroyers.”

FYI, here’s the Metro Bank mantra which so thoroughly incorporates these ideas:

Are you going to cost cut your way to prosperity? Or are you going to spend your way to prosperity?”

Over-invest in our people, over-invest in our facilities.”

Cost cutting is a death spiral. Our whole story is growing revenue.”

All yours …

Auckland Perth MASTER 01 March 2019

(Suggestion: Check out the two “FIRST THINGS BEFORE FIRST THINGS” sections near the beginning of the presentation. Though not annotated, they mostly speak for themselves, I think.)

ExtremeHumanization
RadicalHumanization
HumanizationOffensive
ExtremeEmployeeEngagement
RadicalEmployeeEngagement

I continue my search for approaches fit for dealing with the “AI tsunami” (talk about an overused term). I have a visceral dislike for “defending against the encroachment ….”
I want offense, not defense.

And attached is my “offensive effort” (yikes, watch those words, Tom) to deal with this tech change—you might call it a short-form follow-up to The Excellence Dividend.

My approach (to going on offense), presented in summary form in the attached (some summary, 33 pages, 6,403 words), is built around the words in the title above:

ExtremeHumanization
RadicalHumanization
HumanizationOffensive
ExtremeEmployeeEngagement
RadicalEmployeeEngagement

There are 19 wee sections which attempt to get at the meaning of, in particular, ExtremeHumanization/ExtremeEmployeeEngagement.

All yours …*

(*The word “Extreme” is not used lightly.)

#1

First blogpost of the year. Better make it good. Well, uh, I mainly want to repeat the last post of 2018. I am hung up on the DEE issue. Deep Employee Engagement. I think it is the answer to a lot of issues, including uncertainty and tech change/AI. So I am attaching a slightly expanded version of my prior “DEE” paper somewhat amended/beefed up.

DEE. A cure all? I honestly think it more or less is.

I love playing with words, so there are actually two versions appended herein. The second is exactly the same as the first, save for the title. The alternate title: EEE (or E-cubed). EEE: Extreme Employee Engagement.

The new versions start with two epigraphs, two of my all-time favorite quotes. To wit:

Richard Branson: “Business has to give people enriching, rewarding lives … or it’s not worth doing.”

Oscar-winning director Robert Altman: “The role of the director is to create a space where the actors and actresses can be more than they have ever been before, more than they have ever dreamed of being.”

Read and re-read (a zillion times) these two quotes—and start living up to the challenge they represent.

Happy 2019.
Now git goin’!

Attachments:
Deep Employee Engagement/DEE
Extreme Employee Engagement/EEE

DEE2019/Deep Employee Engagement

How about making DEE/Deep Employment Engagement your principal theme for 2019? It’s more than a “winning formula.” It’s the right thing to do. It is the moral thing to do. And: It is the profitable thing to do.

Who could ask for more?

Happy 2019!

Now get your backside in gear.

Launch date: 1/2/2019.

The “why”:

DEE maximizes the quality of CUSTOMER engagement.
DEE maximizes customer retention.
DEE makes it safe to take risks which in turn maximizes INNOVATION at all levels of the organization.
DEE radically improves individual and organizational learning.
DEE enhances co-operation which dramatically improves all-important cross-functional communication.
DEE improves the quality of joint ventures.
DEE enhances teamwork which then increases PRODUCTIVITY and QUALITY.
DEE dramatically improves EXECUTION.
DEE reduces turnover and stabilizes the work force.
DEE makes it possible to recruit top talent.
DEE means top employees are far more likely to stay with the organization.
DEE improves the reputation of the company as viewed by all stakeholders.
DEE improves community relations.
DEE is a contribution to humanity.
DEE is the only sane and honorable response to the forthcoming radical changes in the global workplace.
DEE makes it possible for leaders to look in the mirror without barfing.
DEE makes it possible for leaders to look in the mirror and smile.
DEE is the bedrock of EXCELLENCE. (No DEE, no excellence. That simple.)
(And, dear bean counters: DEE is a peerless/the best/sustainable profit-maximization tool. DEE = Money [lots of] in the bank.)

[Ed.: Also in PDF format, 04 Jan 2019]

Google Surprise

“Hard (plans, numbers, org charts) is soft. Soft (people, relationships, culture) is hard.” Those two sentences-ideas have been the core of my work for decades.

So how about this, from a 12/20/17 Washington Post article:

“Project Oxygen [data from 1998-2013] shocked everyone [at Google] by concluding that among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills—being a good coach, communicating and listening well, having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues …”

The paper attached here—”Hard is Soft. Soft is Hard. Google Gets a (Big) (Soft) Surprise”—starts with the Google case and moves into other arenas to discuss “Hard is soft. Soft is hard.” It is very short and intended to be a thought starter. It’s also, frankly, an excuse to get the Google finding in front of more people: If the Google tale doesn’t make you stop in your tracks, I honestly don’t know what would!!!!!!!!!! (The excerpt included from Rich Karlgaard’s book The Soft Edge is also a “showstopper”—giving conventional wisdom a well deserved good, swift, kick in the butt.)

Over to you …

Google Surprise Plus