The Little Big Things

by Thomas J Peters

  Extended Idea: Wander Writ Large … generic “in-touch-ism.”

  Put “wandering” on your permanent-formal agenda! Consider: I was recently giving a speech to retailers. To prepare, I had studied my butt off. Read a ton. Hung on to every damn Google link for dear life. Phoned a dozen experts.

  My data was analyzed. My speech was locked into “PPFinal” status. I was in my hotel room in Chicago, at 3:00 P.M. Needing a mental timeout, I decided to take a stroll and “wandered” into shop after shop, apparently aimlessly, for a little over two hours.

  Got back to my room. Unlocked my PPFinal. And more or less started all over again. (Outcome: Speech “could have been worse”—the very highest grade I assign to one of my own speeches.) I can’t tell you precisely what I gleaned on that two-hour excursion-wander. I can tell you it “changed everything.” That is, I got “in the zone,” I physically and emotionally inhabited the Retail-Client-of-Tomorrow’s World … and I somehow infused the fruits of my wandering into almost every sentence of what I subsequently presented.

  It may sound counterintuitive, but “aimless wandering” requires strict discipline. We all fall into ruts, even in our wanderlust. Same route. Same people. Same time of day. Same duration. Etc. Etc. Perhaps you should behave like a personal security planner—that is, ensure that you take a different, randomized route-of-wander. Somehow you’ve got to introduce spontaneity-aimlessness. Make a pledge to “just” “wander” … at least a half hour each day. You’ll be amazed at what happens when you come back to the pile of work on your desk or the doc on your screen.

  I am an MBWA zealot.

  I SWEAR BY MBWA.

  In any and all circumstances.

  Join me?

  (P-l-e-a-s-e.)

  “PAPER OR PLASTIC?” NO, PRESENCE

  Shopping for Easter dinner in a crowded Shaw’s [market] in Manchester Center, Vermont, at about 1:00 P.M. Saturday. As I check out, I’m delighted to see a bagger—an effort to relieve congestion. I am even more delighted to see that my … bagger … is, per his badge, the …

  Store Manager!!(!!)

  Four hearty cheers!

  (And, alas, ever so rare.)

  88. ALL Senses! Or Nonsense!

  I swear I can hear him.

  The successful community bank CEO.

  (He attended one of my four-day Northern California seminars.)

  I swear I can hear him!

  But, actually, it was two decades ago.

  But I swear I can hear him!

  The topic was MBWA.

  Or Close to the Customer.

  Or something akin.

  I remember his translation from his world to what I had been discussing. It went (precisely) like this:

  “Tom, let me give you the definition of a good lending officer. On Sunday, after church, driving the family home, he takes a little detour past a distribution center he’s lent money to. Doesn’t go in, barely slows down, just takes a look, tidiness, external maintenance, whatever, takes it in with all his senses. That’s all.”

  And that was it.

  In touch.

  All senses.

  Fleeting but “real.”

  Have I just explained the alpha through omega of the financial meltdown?

  Of course not!

  But, to put it mildly, we could have used a few more “all-senses” “drive-bys” in the world of mortgage banking. (Maybe in a few of the Credit Default Swap shops, too!)

  Don’t mess around!

  Don’t mess with me!

  No damned excuses! Right now!

  Plan this week’s “drive-by”-“walkabout” schedule!

  Event #1 should be within the next three hours!

  Execute!

  Review and adjust!

  Repeat!

  Forever!

  89. Leave Your Wallet (or Pocketbook) at Home.

  I recently forgot to take my wallet with me on a grocery trip. (When home, I’m the designated shopper in the family.) It was only after I got to the grocery store—22 miles from home, the closest—that I discovered my mistake. Luckily, I had a secret cash stash in my glove compartment, just for this sort of eventuality. Boy, did I ever decimate that (not-so-small) stash in my five or six stops around town!

  So what?

  I, undoubtedly like you, typically pay for stuff with plastic or keystrokes. There is many an “ouch” in the process. But the credit-card “ouch” is a far cry from peeling off $138 at the grocery store, $47 to fill a … Subaru, $78 at one of my “ordinary” stops at the bookstore, and more, more, more at a couple of other shops—for example, $68 for fresh fish for four. One’s sense of the true cost of living goes up by an order of magnitude.

  For those who are solos or who work in a small professional office or a retail operation, I’d urge you some month to repeat my adventure in some form or other; after paying the office supply bill in $20s, I’ll bet a pretty penny or 10 that you’ll be ushering in an era of tighter purse strings … ASAP.

  In MediumCo or BigCo world, if, say, you’ve got departments reporting to you, what about invoicing the department heads in the old-fashioned paper way for services rendered—and demanding that he-she pay the bill by writing a check; not quite as powerful as watching the cash stash shrink, but perhaps a start.

  The bigger point is obvious, if elusive—more than ever, companies of all sizes have to bring reality home in some high-impact way. Not that “work as a clerk for a day” silliness—which is just a rather fun game—but something more realistic.

  Many (many) years ago I did a stint in the Pentagon, working on military construction—Navy bases, etc. One day the admiral in charge called a few of us into his office. We mostly worked on translating the needs of the field into Pentagonese. (I’m not sure I ever got entirely over it.) The sums were, even then, in the billions—and we abbreviated with $2.3B, $1.4B, etc. The admiral said we were all “too damned careless” with taxpayers’ money (a wondrous sentiment in the Big Five-sided Building), and that, starting immediately, we’d be required to put in all the zeros; $2.3B would now be $2,300,000,000, and so forth. I can’t promise you that this little drill in the end benefited the taxpayer; but I can tell you that it did, as the admiral intended, make us think twice. A trivial story—or not. You be the judge.

  Pay for your groceries with cash next time.

  Your car repair, too.

  The office supply bill? Ditto.

  By hook or by crook … drag realism in the office door.

  90. Get Down from Your Pedestal—and Beware the Sound of Laughter!

  In his autobiography, General Norman Schwarzkopf reveals, hardly central to his story but perhaps worth my brief recounting, that he simply cannot tell a joke effectively. Forgets stuff. Timing off. Screws up the punch line. Etc. But then a funny thing happened when he got promoted to general. The moment he pinned a … Star … on his collar he apparently became hilarious—associates started laughing uproariously at his jokes, botched or not.

  The message is obvious, and it’s one for all who manage, not just general officers: Beware underlings who laugh at your jokes. Fact is, and an important one: Once you become a boss you will never hear the unadulterated truth again! (Keyword: Never.) And that’s almost as true for a 20-year-old shift boss in a Dunkin’ Donuts in Littlesville as for a senior middle manager or business owner or General S.

  The bald truth is that if you are a manager, you are a power figure. Period. Others’ success at work is tied to your whims and fancies—and so those others will naturally, even if reluctantly, want to please you and won’t exactly be itching to disagree with you or find your jokes unfunny. (I’m not suggesting they lie—just that they sometimes aren’t likely to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Like reporting a “minor” screw-up with a customer.)

  But the “remedies” are clear and more or less foolproof, though you must be disciplined in applying them. First, by a country mile, “being there.” Former GM plant manager Pat Carrigan, the f
irst woman to run a GM plant, caused a local revolution by walking the shop floor daily. (The prior plant manager, I was told on camera for a PBS show, never—as in not once in a half-dozen Years—went out to where the action was.)

  A second strategy is making end runs around your own hierarchy. While president of PepsiCo, the late Andy Pearson would visit an operation such as Frito-Lay, and, after a cursory nod to the CEO, he would head directly to the bullpen where the junior sub-brand managers lived. He’d pick one at random, sit down with her for an hour, and discuss in the greatest detail imaginable what was going on in her small neck of the woods. Not only would he be judging Frito’s bench strength, but also zeroing in on unmasticated data.

  A third strategy, if you’re up in the hierarchy a couple of notches or more, is to have a trusted “good cop” nearby. Call this spying if you must, but you’re not asking this person to ferret out problem employees for retribution. Rather, the idea is to have someone friendly on hand who can sniff around and give you direct feedback on how things smell—and how you smell—where the rubber meets the road. Obviously, your degree of trust in him/her must be stratospheric; and his/her diplomatic skills must be damn good as well.

  So I remind all bosses, courtesy General Norm: Beware the sound of laughter when you tell a joke! Beware the admiring comment when you wear a stunning new scarf or tie to work!

  (As always in the real world, there are a host of caveats. To cite one example, when your trip to the frontlines becomes a … State Visit … in which all normal operations come to a grinding halt and everyone puts on their BBGs/Best Behavior Grins, not only will nothing be gained, but quite a bit may be lost as others snicker at your attempt to “be as one with the masses.” To top that off, some people are simply more standoffish than others; while you can and should “work on this,” change does not come easily.)

  91. Big Plan? No, Small Steps (Steps on the Ground).

  In The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, nation-building expert William Easterly laments, “[T]he West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get three dollars to each new mother to prevent five million child deaths … But I and many other like-minded people keep trying, not to abandon aid to the poor, but to make sure it reaches them.”

  Easterly is the archenemy of the Big Plan (his capital letters, not mine—for once) and the fan of practical activities of “Searchers” (his cap “S”) who learn the ins and outs of the culture, politics, and local conditions “on the ground” in order to use local levers, and get those 12-cent medicines to community members. He writes [with my emphasis]:

  “In foreign aid, Planners announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and build on them. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom. Planners never hear whether the planned recipients got what they needed; Searchers find out if the customer is satisfied….

  “A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial-and-error experimentation. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.”

  (NB: Excuse the length of this extract, but the preceding statement is among the most brilliant I have ever read about implementation of anything, anywhere. Among other things, it explains the stratospheric overall failure rate of consultants, in terms of implemented plans, and the stratospheric share in enterprises of “staff”-centric projects that end in tears.)

  Herewith, some of the “lessons” I’ve extracted from William Easterly:

  Lesson: Show up! Stay! “Boots on the ground,” “permanently,” at the loci of implementation. (No long “home leaves” if possible—“in this with you” is the message that must be sent.)

  Lesson: Invest in ceaseless study of conditions “on the ground”— social and political and historical and systemic.

  Lesson: Talk to the “locals.”

  Lesson: Listen to the “locals.” (And listen.) (With perceived patience!) (And listen.) (And listen.) (And listen.) (And listen.) (And listen.) (And listen.) (And then listen some more.)

  (And listen.)

  Lesson: Respect the “locals.”

  Lesson: Empathize with the “locals.”

  Lesson: Try to blend in, adopting local customs, showing deference where necessary—and never interrupt the “big man” in front of his folks, even, or especially, if you think he is 180 degrees off. (Save your “help” for later, in private.)

  Lesson: By hook or by crook, network! E.g., seek out the local leaders’ second cousins, etc., to gain indirect access to their uncle twice removed!

  Lesson: All things come to she or he who Masters the Art of Indirection! (The “second cousins” route redux.)

  Lesson: Have a truly crappy office, and other un-trappings! (Make “invisibility” and humility your mantras!)

  Lesson: Remember, you do not, in fact, have the answers, despite your Ph.D., with honors, from the University of Chicago—where you were mentored not by one, but by two Nobel laureates in Economics.

  Lesson: Regardless of the enormity of the problem, proceed by trial (manageable in size) and error, error, error. (Failure motto: “Do it right the first time!” Success motto: “Do it mostly right, we hope, the 37th time!” And hustle through those 37 tries!)

  Lesson: The process of political-community engagement must also be approached as a trial-and-error learning process. (Again, the enemy is “do it right the first—or second—time.”)

  Lesson: Take full advantage of systemic “variation.” Some places-communities will be way ahead of others—and can act as full or partial “demos,” with you playing the role of mere cheerleader and tour guide. “Found experiments” may save years and will have the merit of local adaptation! (On the other hand, political sensibilities may deter one community from adopting another’s approach—again, Mastery of Local Political Process and Mastery of the Art of Indirection are imperative.)

  Lesson: You may have long “losing streaks.” Be brave!

  Lesson: Always alter the experiment to accommodate local needs—the act of even tiny local modification per se is critical, as every community leader, in order for him to accept “ownership” and demonstrate to his constituents that “we are in charge,” must feel as if he has directly and measurably influenced the experiment.

  Lesson: Growth (the experimental and expansion-emulation process) must be organic, and proceed at a measured pace—nudged, not hurried beyond a certain point.

  Lesson: Speed kills! (To a point.)

  Lesson: Short-circuiting political process kills!

  Lesson: Premature rollout kills!

  Lesson: Too much publicity kills!

  Lesson: Too much money kills!

  Lesson: Too much technology kills!

  Lesson: The opposite of the preceding six “lessons” are also true—if you can’t deal with paradox, you’re in the wrong business. (One more time: Beware of dogmatists!)

  Lesson: Outsiders, to be effective, must have genuine appreciation of—and affection for—the locals with whom and for whom they are working!

  Lesson: Condescension kills most—said “locals” know
unimaginably more about life than well-intentioned “do-gooders,” young, or even, alas, not so young.

  Lesson: Progress … MUST … MUST … MUST … be consistent with “local politics on the ground” in order to up the odds of sustainability even a smidgen.

  (“Local politics”—“the last 95 percent”!)

  (Make that “the last 98 percent”!)

  (Politics: Love it—or go home!* ** ***)

  (*Hint: This applies … everywhere!)

  (**No “politics,” no progress!)

  (***True ab-so-lute-ly everywhere.)

  Lesson: Never forget the atmospherics, such as numerous celebrations for tiny milestones reached, showering praise on the local leader and your local cohorts, while you assiduously stand at the back of the back of the crowd—etc.

  Lesson: The experiment has failed until the systems and political rewards, often small, are in place, with Beta tests completed, to up the odds of repetition.

  Lesson: Most of your on-the-ground staff must consist of respected locals—the de facto or de jure chairwoman or CEO must be local; you must be virtually invisible.

  Lesson: Spend enormous “pointless” social time with the local political leaders; in Gulf War I, Norm Schwarzkopf spent his evenings, nearly all of them, drinking tea until 2:00 A.M. or 3:00 A.M. with the Saudi crown prince to assuage Saudi concerns about having heathen troops on sacred soil!

  Lesson: Keep your “start-up” plan simple and short and filled with question marks in order to allow others to have the next-to-the-last word and the last word.

  Lesson: And a hundred other things!!

  To summarize the summary:

  Show up!

  Listen!

  Hear!

  Respect!

  Empathize!

  Skip the Grand Theorems!

  Dive in and Try and Try and Adjust and Try Again and Plagiarize from Extant Experiments … until You’re Blue in the Face!

  Move at an appropriate pace, urgent but not a headline-grabbing pace!