The Little Big Things

by Thomas J Peters

  Knowing Oneself

  Excellence as Aspiration, Excellence as Standard for Behavioral Evaluation. Excellence Everywhere. Excellence All the Time.

  Elective Menu

  Recruiting Top Talent for 100 Percent of Jobs

  Recruiting for Smiles, Enthusiasm, Energy, Other “Soft Stuff”

  Nurturing Talent/Helping People (Employees, Customers, Vendors, Communities) Grow Beyond Measure and Realize Their Dreams

  Building “Beautiful Systems”/Building Anti-Systems for Attacking Systems’ Overcomplexity

  Women as Preeminent Leaders

  The Art of Finding and Nurturing Weirdos

  Building “Skunkworks”/“Black” Budgets/“Off-the-Books” Centers of Innovation

  The Art and Science of Influencing Others I, II

  The Preeminent Role of Emotion/Perception/Irrationality in Positively Everything

  Creating or Changing a Unit’s “Culture”

  Bringing Spirit to the Workplace

  Marketing

  Marketing to and Developing Products for Women I, II

  Marketing to and Developing Products for Boomers-Geezers I, II

  Rapid Prototyping of Everything, and the Art of Serious Play

  Increasing a Unit’s Metabolic Rate

  Diversity Power Everywhere of Every Flavor

  The Power of Universal Transparency

  Finance

  Business Strategy

  While I admit that the tongue is within range of cheek, the spirit encompassed by the above is deadly serious. (If not the 10 years to get it under one’s belt.) As to practicalities, at least consider these sensibilities when you are designing your training curriculum.

  FLIP-FLOP

  Implicit in the above are a series of more or less 180-degree course reversals. Among them:

  FROM: TO:

  Economics Psychology

  Marketing Sales

  Strategy Execution

  Men Women

  Finance Accounting

  Hard Soft

  Sexy leadership Dull old management

  Time

  123. It Might Be Later Than You Think.

  A “couple of minutes” late is … late.

  Five minutes late is … late.

  One-point-three minutes late is late.

  Late is … Late.

  “Better late than never”?

  Never.

  Period.

  Early is not late.

  Early is respect.

  Early = “I care.”

  (It matters.)

  (Arriving early for a meeting is not a sign that you are “anxious.” It is a sign that you are … PUNCTUAL.)

  (Late is rude.)

  (George Washington was never late.)

  (I don’t mean to insult you with this one, but this is a book about the [all-too-often-ignored] “obvious.”)

  124. Time Off for Smart Behavior.

  Hustle rules. But the very same times that call for speed-speed-speed also call for matchless creativity, and that doesn’t always match up with 90-hour workweeks—especially back-to-back-to-back 90-hour weeks. So, in the course of the day, week, year, figure out how to take a pause that refreshes.

  And take it.

  Some, like me, swear by two-minute meditation breaks. (Even one-minute meditation breaks.) Movie afternoons or whatever for a stressed-out team on severe deadline may work wonders. Vacations of more than 10 days are a must.* (*Damn near everybody I know agrees that it takes about 10 days to get into the “relaxation zone.” Period. Gates does it annually.) Two free days at the end of or, especially, in the middle of a trying business trip make sense. The larger point is … work consciously at de-stressing. This idea is absolutely positively “strategic”; in no way is it merely a “nice thing to do.”

  NB1: Work on your breathing!!!

  NB2: Trust me … p-l-e-a-s-e … this applies to 27-year-olds as much as or more than 67-year-olds.

  NB3: Ho hum, the boss must “model the way.”

  “CRACKBERRY” ADDICTS: TIME FOR DETOX

  F***ING BLACKBERRY BREAKS!

  THE WORLD WILL NOT COME TO AN END IF YOU ARE OUT OF TOUCH FOR 20 MINUTES.

  OR AN HOUR.

  OR A DAY.

  THE WORLD HAS NEARLY COME TO AN END BECAUSE, IN FACT, FAR TOO MANY “BRILLIANT” PEOPLE WORKED 60/60/24/7/365–366 … AND TOOK TOTAL LEAVE OF COMMON SENSE. (I.e., PDAs sure helped the Wall Street crowd keep us out of the tank. Not.)

  IF YOU ARE CONSTANTLY ON YOUR BLACKBERRY, IT IS MOSTLY BECAUSE OF AN … ARROGANT, CONSUMING SENSE OF SELF-IMPORTANCE TOTALLY DIVORCED FROM REALITY.

  125. Time Out for … Daydreaming!

  Dov Frohman is a pioneer in the semiconductor industry. Among (many) other things, he started Intel Israel and was significantly responsible for the growth of Israel’s potent high-tech sector. With Robert Howard, he presented us with, surprisingly, a truly original book on leadership, Leadership the Hard Way: Why Leadership Can’t Be Taught—and How You Can Learn It Anyway. (Nice title!)

  A few of the provocative chapter titles are: “Insisting on Survival,” “Leadership Under Fire” (literally—Israel, remember), “Leveraging Random Opportunities.” In a chapter titled “The Soft Skills of Hard Leadership,” Frohman astonishes (or, at least, astonished me) as he insists that the leader-manager must free up no less than 50 percent of his-her time from routine tasks. To wit:

  “Most managers spend a great deal of time thinking about what they plan to do but relatively little time thinking about what they plan not to do. As a result, they become … so caught up in fighting the fires of the moment that they cannot really attend to the long-term threats and risks facing the organization. So the first soft skill of leadership the hard way is to cultivate the perspective of Marcus Aurelius: avoid busyness, free up your time, stay focused on what really matters.

  “Let me put it bluntly: every leader should routinely keep a substantial portion of his or her time—I would say as much as 50 percent—unscheduled … Only when you have substantial ‘slop’ in your schedule—unscheduled time—will you have the space to reflect on what you are doing, learn from experience, and recover from your inevitable mistakes.

  “Leaders without such free time end up tackling issues only when there is an immediate or visible problem … Managers’ typical response to my argument about free time is, ‘That’s all well and good, but here are all the things I have to do.’ Yet we waste so much time in unproductive activity. It takes enormous effort on the part of the leader to keep time free for the truly important things.”

  The second unconventional, mind-ripping idea from the same chapter is “daydreaming.”

  “The Discipline of Daydreaming”: “Nearly every major decision of my business career was, to some degree, the result of daydreaming … To be sure, in every case I had to collect a lot of data, do detailed analysis, and make a data-based argument to convince superiors, colleagues, and business partners. But all that came later. In the beginning, there was the daydream.

  “By daydreaming, I mean loose, unstructured thinking with no particular goal in mind … In fact, I think daydreaming is a distinctive mode of cognition especially well suited to the complex, ‘fuzzy’ problems that characterize a more turbulent business environment….

  “Daydreaming is also an effective means of coping with complexity. When a problem has high degrees of complexity, the level of detail can be overwhelming. The more one focuses on the details, the more one risks becoming lost in them … Every child knows how to daydream. But many, perhaps most, lose the capacity as they grow up.”

  Neither of these suggestions is easy to implement—and that’s obviously an understatement. Nonetheless, I think we must try. Dov Frohman’s track record in a hypertough–lightning-fast environment is stunning. And I trust his self-assessment of the reasons for that success, the two cited here chief among them. Hence, I suggest it is well worth your time and that of your leader colleagues to ponder: 50 percent unschedu
led time. (And Mr. Frohman is doubtless busier than you and I are.)Daydreams as Source #1 of strategy.

  (NB: If you do decide to play around with this, try to stick with Frohman’s dictum—50 percent. Conjure up what that means. Not 20 percent or 30 percent … but 50 percent. You may not get there, but examining the idea-of-50-per-se is clearly worthwhile.)

  126. Master the Art of Milestoning.

  A recent trip from Vermont to Massachusetts (173.6 mi.) got me thinking of something else besides pit stops. I was running late, and noting my progress via odometer and various landmarks and highway markers. As my mood went up and down I realized (re-realized?) the power of manageable goals in every form of activity.

  Amassing 173+ miles, the entire task, is of course the Big Enchilada—but a horrifying and demotivating thought at 4:00 A.M., which is often my departure time if I aim to beat Boston’s morning rush hour. The sort of thing that spurs me on is … “scoring” the readily achievable 13-mile nugget from home to Dorset, Vermont. (Hooray, I’ve made a noticeable start!!) Likewise, bagging the 12 miles from Gill, Massachusetts (about halfway from Vermont), to Erving, Massachusetts, is downright exhilarating (it means finishing about 50 percent of the most traffic-y 27-mile stretch of road).

  As I thought on this, I realized/re-realized a bunch of things:

  (1) Milestones are all-important, no matter how trivial or repetitive the task.

  (2) “Milestoning” is a real art for reasons psychological, as much as or more than for reasons of “substance.”

  (3) Truly trivial milestones are often meaningless, even if they are “accomplishments” of a sort and “milestones” of a sort—scoring the eyedrop’s distance from the Dorset turn to the Stratton turn is no big deal and not really a motivator.

  (4) Milestone “power” is variable. E.g., at the beginning or near the end of a task, the apparently trivial can indeed seem utterly grand. “Well, I’ve done something”—that’s what I feel seconds after 4:00 A.M. when I make it to the immediate end of the farm road that starts at our house, thus putting behind me the first click, or 0.7 miles, in numbing reality a scant 0.4 percent of the whole. (Milestone power is also variable on other dimensions. In the workday context, for instance, smallish milestones that are critical spurs to the team’s doing the job may look pretty darned puny to the boss; hence, widespread publication thereof may not be a great idea.)

  (5) There is a definite sweet spot … “the perfect milestone.” That 13 miles from home to Dorset, or the 12 miles from Gill to Erving, is a winner—substantial enough to matter, to merit a pumped fist at 4:23 A.M., and to constitute “progress of note.”

  (6) There is a fine line between “trivial” on the one end and “daunting” on the other. (A 27-mile stretch, if thought of that way, is downright discouraging: “Dear God, these 27 miles of Route 2 are frigging endless.”)

  Each time Vermont’s Loooong Winter approaches, I dread the fact that on truly rotten days I’ll be forced to execute my power-walking addiction on my treadmill. I hate hate hate exercising indoors! But to the point of this item, I spent a pretty penny on a new treadmill a while back. Why? Mostly because the distance accumulator indicator goes to three decimal places instead of two. I crave constant measurable progress while on the damn machine, and nothing but nothing is “trivial.” I feel like the wind is at my back as the odometer moves from 1.723 miles to 1.724. On the old machine, struggling from 1.72 to 1.73 took approximately … FOREVER.

  Ah, milestone power!

  You are indeed welcome to dismiss the triviality of my examples here—but I do urge you to pay the closest attention to the … Art of Milestoning. It’s actually of the utmost importance if, like me, you believe in the Ultimate and Abiding Power of what I call “XX,” or “Double X”—the relentless pursuit of eXcellence in eXecution.

  Action: Become a “milestone activist.” Use milestoning as a matter of routine, but do so with the greatest care, as only partially explained above—that is, become a Milestone Professional as well as a Milestone Activist.

  NB: “Milestoning” is a group endeavor, not a top-down activity.

  NB: The Art of Milestone Celebration is also worthy of your (avid!) study and application.

  NB: This is a Big Deal.

  Design

  127. Design Is … Everywhere!

  “Everything is design.”

  -Richard Farson, The Power of Design: A Force for Transforming Everything

  Design!

  How Cool!

  How … Powerful!

  And: How pervasive! (See the quote above.)

  Sure, “design” means the string of gorgeous products from Apple or OXO or Herman Miller or John Deere. But it applies equally to the “presentation” of the training course you are about to deliver. And “design mindfulness” is at the heart of the new purchasing process about to be unveiled-in a 20-person organization. And it’s the soul of the reception area in a 3-person accountancy; and the very heart of the Formal Reports that same accountancy delivers. (Long before Design became “cool”-and the “D” was routinely capitalized!-McKinsey had a full-scale department devoted to report design. Leeway on format for Client reports? ZERO.)

  Hence, if you are serious about design:

  (1) It becomes part of every (e-v-e-r-y) project, tiny to grand, in every (e-v-e-r-y) department.

  Design is Sony … in everything they do.

  Design is Apple … in everything they do.

  Design is BMW … in everything they do.

  Design is Starbucks … in everything they do.

  Design is Nike … in everything they do.

  Design is the New York Yankees … in everything they do.

  Design is Barack Obama … in everything he does.

  Design is Nicolas Sarkozy … in everything he does.

  Design should be the four-person engineering subunit … in everything they do.

  Design should be you … in everything you do.

  (2) Every project has a formal “design advocate.”

  (3 Everyone is encouraged through example to become “design minded.” (And it’s part of their formal evaluation.) (Everyone = General management to housekeeping at the hotel, managing partner to receptionist at the accountancy or consultancy.)

  (4) Design is always considered on five dimensions: (a) usability, (b) simplicity, (c) aesthetics, (d) “Cool”/“Wow”/“Gaspworthy,” and (e) Excellence.

  (5) Every work pace is a living example of Excellence in design—it sings “our song.”

  (6) Design EXCELLENCE applies to every business process as much as to every product.

  (7) Design per se is explicitly addressed in every written work plan.

  (8) While design is not always “free,” design-mindedness is not a cost item—and EXCELLENCE in design applies at least as much to the “low end” as to the luxury end of a market.

  (9) Design Reviews are part of all project reviews. (I stole this from Boots the Chemist in the UK.)

  (10) If you are a/the Big Boss, there should be a … Chief Design Officer … who lives in the “power corridor” with the Chief Financial Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, etc. (If you are a “little boss,” there should be an appointed “design champion” whose collateral duty is to represent the “design view” in all the unit’s work product.)

  (11) “Design-mindfulness” or “EXCELLENCE in design” should (must!) be part of the organization’s Core Values Statement. (“Design Excellence will be a trademark of all we do outside our company—and in all our internal activities as well.” Or some such.)

  (12) Design per se should be directly and indirectly part of all training programs.

  (13) Etc.

  (14) Etc.

  HOPE WE SCORED!

  In my drafts of this book, and I trust it shows here, I was as concerned about design as about the prose. There is some extensive narrative, but many of our items are short and meant to be punchy—energetic, provocative, etc. I obsessed about the “look & feel”�
��I religiously (correct word choice) believe that “the look is the message”—and that I cannot deliver in any way, shape, or form on my intent for The Little BIG Things unless the presentation mirrors—and then pushes waaaaaaay forward—the “tone” and “soul” of the text.

  I drifted this way starting with The Tom Peters Seminar in 1993. Then in 2003, I left inarguably one of the world’s top five publishers, Knopf, to go to Dorling Kindersley—solely because they are peerless in book design, and I was keen to do no less than “re-imagine” (the subsequent title of the DK book) the business book per se to match the hyperenergetic times. If we didn’t quite succeed with Re-imagine!, it damn well wasn’t for want of grand/grandiose aspiration or lack of trying!

  Have we met the same stratospheric standard here at Harper-Studio?

  You alone will be the judge.

  But, again, if we fall short, it won’t be because we were modest in our aims, though with a far different goal for the book; there was no intent to extend the Dorling Kindersley look. Instead I hope the look and feel and text herein bring to life the idea—and soul—of “little BIG things”!

  Design is me!

  (And I’m hoping design-will-be-you.)

  (Bragging moment: When I started my then inchoate design crusade, in the mid-1980s, I had but one real cohort in yakkerworld/“guruworld,” the Financial Times’s Chris Lorenz. A few years later, it gave me the utmost egocentric pleasure when IDEO founder David Kelley publicly labeled me “the business world’s leading ambassador of design”—I’d have thought Steve Jobs would have merited that descriptor. Hooray for me. Today I can say delightedly that I have yielded that “leading ambassador” moniker to literally dozens, or hundreds, of others! Design is now seen by many as “differentiator #1” in many corners of the world of commerce—albeit lip service is often the standard, which is why I’m still screaming, including right here.)