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Tom Peters Times December 2007 | | | Happy Holidays!
Wishing you a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2008!
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 | | Christmas Greetings
Blog posting by Cathy Mosca at www.tompeters.com on December 24, 2007.
From 1984 to 1994 Tom had a weekly column, syndicated by the Chicago Tribune, which ran in about 100 papers. This Christmas column appeared, we think, in about 1988. Thanks to a blog reader named Dorothy Lyskowski, who sent us a scanned copy of the one she had saved all these years! So, our Christmas offering to all our readers, as an MSWord file and in a PDF version: "Lessons About Life & Enterprise from Baking Christmas Cookies."
To download the Word file or PDF, click here.
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| | MVPs, 2007
Blog entry written by Tom Peters on www.tompeters.com, 12/19/07
For what it's worth, my heroes (& goats) of 2007
CEO: Carly Fiorina. HP, not IBM, became the first $100 billion infotech company this year. Primary reason? The highly contentious, and surprisingly successful, Compaq acquisition and integration. (And, God knows, I don't ordinarily cheer such acquisitions—though I did, in this case, from the start.) Tenacious champion? Carly Fiorina! HP is now seen as a "consumer powerhouse." Laughable idea a few years ago. Transformation agent: Ms Fiorina. HP is "cool" with scintillating designs. Laughable idea just a few years ago. Transformation agent? Carly. New and not so nerdy "culture." Architect? Carly Fiorina. (And said cultural transformation, frankly, makes Welch's work at GE and Gerstner's at IBM a cakewalk by comparison.)
Do I give Ms Fiorina uniformly high marks? No. Does her successor, Mark Hurd, get significant credit? Absolutely. But make no mistake, Mr Hurd is executing Ms Fiorina's bold strategy and working with her altered culture. Period.
CEO: Arnold Schwarzenegger. President Schwarzenegger has made a miracle in my beloved California Republic. Not only has he done "great stuff"—he's retrieved California's swagger and indomitable spirit. Go, Guvenator!
Company: Basement Systems Inc. Love it when there is a superstar performer in a mundane business. Founder-CEO Larry Janesky has built a $50 million ++, fast-growing enterprise in the biz of providing dry basements—that are free of nasty mold and available as another (big) room in one's home. (Also see Larry's bestselling Dry Basement Science.)
To continue reading the blog entry, click here.
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| | The PSF's Strategic Use of Intellectual Capital
Professional Service Firms (PSFs) become recognized as sources of thought leadership when they create innovative solutions that re-position their clients to leapfrog their competition. But does it work?
Today, when competition knows no geographic boundaries, the expertise of consulting, law, IT services, accounting and audit, training and development, and others, becomes ever more vital for resolving problems of rising impact and complexity. These are critical economic issues: rescuing failing companies and dying industries; resuscitating demoralized management teams and workforces; defending companies from spurious and costly lawsuits; building critical new information systems to bolster operations, and so on. To address these issues, organizations are increasingly putting their fates in the hands of professional services firms, giving them immense responsibility to:
Solve long-standing organizational problems
Invent new answers to problems
Creating new models, new practices, and new services - new "intellectual capital," to use the fashionable term - is the lifeblood of a PSF. Every PSF has two business imperatives:
To create and market thought leadership
To train clients how to use these new ideas
It makes solid business sense. Those PSFs who generate strong intellectual capital have a profound advantage when their clients use their expertise in ways that are hard to replicate. When professional service firms package this intellectual capital correctly, and when the ideas are powerful - real thought leadership - they can grab the minds and hearts of problem-sodden CEOs looking for clear answers to chaotic and consequential problems.
TPC lives and breathes these business imperatives. Tom's intellectual capital is rich with great ideas, and we train clients how to use them. Specifically, his thought leadership addresses talent retention. This is becoming the 21st century's most powerful challenge. Starting in 2008, there will be an average of 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day. Over the next five to eight years, close to 78 million workers will leave the workforce. Replacing those employees will be a pain point for all CEOs who must grow their businesses. A new study is underway to identify culture characteristics required to attract great talent. Stand by for the results, scheduled to be released in 2008. Our position as a PSF is based on the intellectual capital that has researched and found culture to be an organization's most strategic asset. We know how to develop that asset so that clients establish an enduring advantage.
Juli Ann Reynolds, President and CEO
Tom Peters Company
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| | Culture is a Strategic Asset
"We hire for 'attitude,' knowing we can train to develop technical skill," says Keith Jones, President & CEO, Executrack. "Collaboration is the most important attribute we want in our culture."
CEOs are learning to refine their process for developing their cultures so that they are able to attract and keep their most qualified employees. They know the culture must be strong to attract the best of the best in a fluctuating labor market to meet their ever changing business needs. Their attention to their culture includes designing succession plans and hiring practices that position them for the future.
Regardless of the economic outlook, recruitment and retention of valuable employees is now recognized as one of the most important cultural issues facing corporations globally. As businesses struggle with layoffs, lower consumer confidence, softening commercial investment, and a volatile stock market, building effective cultures has moved from the responsibility of Human Resources to that of the Boardroom. With a sharp focus on human capital, developing a strong culture is now a key investment. Corporate executive officers are expected to present a clear strategy so that employees know what to do to execute - all while attracting the industry's best talent to get it done. Their own value to their organization is, in part, measured by how skilled they are at leading, recruiting, and retaining key talent who are enthusiastic about their work environment.
As Linda Rabbit, Chairman and CEO, Rand Construction stated, "I had a vision that we could have a culture where employees would enjoy their jobs and could get fulfillment out of what they're doing. And, I have spent most of my time trying to make that happen. TPC assessed our culture, and we could see clearly what key behaviors needed to be reinforced to achieve high degrees of productivity. Don't make it harder than it needs to be. Communicate everything, listen constantly, roll your sleeves up, and work alongside your people if you want them to know how much they mean to your company's success," she states.
The desire to pass on a successful business was Larry Janesky's incentive to investigate the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. "Once we got involved with the Criteria, we became more passionate about having the best culture to become more competitive," says Larry. Organizations most committed to earning money for their shareholders have leaders who state that their culture is its most important asset. Great cultures breed attraction to and retention of talent - it is the key factor to their future success as an industry winner.
Why bother? The best effective recruiting tool is the reputation a company enjoys in a community. Turnover of employees is both bad PR and very expensive. Shareholders should know exactly what the turnover costs are, because they know that it is a business imperative to do everything possible to recruit exactly the right people while providing the right work environment to keep them. To retain great talent, develop a culture where employees are enthusiastic about executing the strategy - where leaders provide the vision and the long-term goals, i.e. where we are going and how we are going to get there.
Juli Ann Reynolds, President and CEO
Tom Peters Company |
| | Cool Friends: Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore 
James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II are co-founders of Strategic Horizons LLP, a thinking studio that helps companies design new ways to add value. In addition to coauthoring their bestseller The Experience Economy, Gilmore and Pine also edited Markets of One and have written articles for the Harvard Business Review. Their recent book is Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore were the very first Cool Friends at TomPeters.com in 1999. At that time they were establishing a prominent place for the word experience in the business lexicon, and they are currently doing the same for the word authenticity. Erik Hansen talks to them about the new book.
tompeters.com asks ...
What is authenticity?
JG: We define it—in the context of business—as the new consumer sensibility, or dominant purchase criterion that's emerging in the Experience Economy. It's the strongest motivation for people to buy. The rise of each economic order has given rise to a new sensibility. With the rise of the Industrial Economy, cost became the dominant sensibility; consumers would purchase based on affordability. Could they afford to buy their first ever radio, dishwasher, or car?
With the rise of the Service Economy, quality emerged as a new sensibility. When you pay somebody else to change your oil, mow your lawn, cut your hair, cook your food, that's when quality emerged as a reason to buy. And now we have a world that's increasingly filled with mediated, staged, and multi-sensory experiences—an increasingly unreal world—which gives rise to people desiring authentic or real experiences.
To continue reading the interview, click here.
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