The Pursuit of WOW - Tom Peters



The Pursuit of WOW! Every Person’s Guide to Topsy-Turvy Times

by Tom Peters

Vintage Books

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York

For Robert and Sarah

What recommends commerce

to me is its enterprise and

bravery. It does not clasp

its hands and pray to Jupiter.

—Henry David Thoreau

Contents

Starters

PAGE 1

Getting Things Done

PAGE 27

Milk, Cookies, and Managing People

PAGE 55

Pens, Toilets, and Businesses That Do it Differently

PAGE 95

Just Say No to Commodities (and Yes to Free Spirits)

PAGE 139

Breaking the Mold

PAGE 161

The Wacky World or (Mostly), What Have You Done about Asia Today?

PAGE 197

Searching for the Diversity Advantage

PAGE 219

Tomorrow’s Strange Enterprises

PAGE 243

Entrepreneurs’ Dreams

PAGE 263

Lists!

PAGE 279

Attaining Perpetual Adolescence

PAGE 301

Parting Shots

PAGE 321

Foreword

This book is about generating yeasty responses—personal and corporate—to these very yeasty, and frequently frightening, times. I’ve called it The Pursuit of WOW!

“Wow” might sound a bit frizzy. I think not. I’m repeatedly struck by the parade of “new” cars that look like every other car, by how many opened French restaurants or just-launched PCs or software packages fail to zap you, by how one Big Six audit service resembles all the others. And I’m also struck by how timid most people are in fending off staleness. Then they wonder why they become a statistic in the continuing middle management and senior professional blood bath.

In preparing this book I’ve looked back on my ten years of writing syndicated columns, had lengthy conversations with dozens of successful entrepreneurs—and convened a session of FedEx employees to talk about diversity. But mostly I’ve let my daily exposure to business over the last 25 years lead my mind where it will: I wondered why I feel compelled to go to London to buy chubby Ball Pentel Fine Point R50 pens. Wondered why thank you notes are always appreciated. Why success (personal, business) invariably leads to hardening of the arteries. Thought about why certain delis 9and churches), in a world full of delis (and churches), reach out and suck you in instantaneously—while so many others only give you a case of the blahs. And why any employee would put up with mistrustful firms that practice random drug testing, unannounced call monitoring, and the like.

All in all, you’ll find 210 numbered observations, from one line to several pages in length and loosely collected by topic in 13 more-or-less chapters.

The common bond is ... WOW: stepping out (individuals at all levels in a firm and independent contractors) and standing out (corporations and other organizations) from the growing crowd of look-alikes.

Being average has never had much appeal. Better to fail with flair in pursuit of something neat. While I think that’s an idea for the ages, right now it takes on great urgency.

India, China, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, the Philippines, Malaysia, ‘Thailand, Indonesia—and more—are coming online. They’re chock-a-block with hundreds of millions of talented, well-educated workers—and already producing sophisticated, high-quality goods that are often the equal of the best from the monster U.S., Japanese, and German economies.

To stay on top of this fermenting global brew will require people and companies to paddle like never before; will require—again—personal and corporate WOW. (And the renewal thereof—in perpetuity.) I hope the ideas from these pages will help you strip off the blinders (the crazy past is soon going to look like mellow prelude) and move yourself toward bold and daring action.

I’ve had a ball pulling all this together. And now I hope you’ll have a ball reading it. I say “had a ball” on purpose and without apology. I think work and business can be creative and exciting. A hoot. A growth experience. A journey of lifelong learning and constant surprise. But, to be honest, I think such rewards will only be yours if you learn to approach your career and enterprise with the strategy I call ...

... THE PURSUIT OF WOW!

Good luck!

Viel Glück!

Buena Suerte!

Bonne Chance!

Starters

1. One-Minute Excellence

One-minute excellence. I can sense the curling of your lips. While such a catchphrase makes me shudder, too, it contains a gem waiting to be discovered.

How do you go on an effective diet? How do you stop smoking? How do you stop drinking?

In short, you do it and it’s done. Then you work like hell for the rest of your life to stay on the weight-maintenance, non-smoking, or booze-free wagon.

A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.

The idea is profound.

Suppose you’re a waiter and, for your own future’s sake (not because of pressure from the clowns who run the restaurant), you decide to set a matchless standard for service. How? You do it. Now.

Sure, you’ll be clumsy at first. You’ll get a lot of it wrong. You’ll need to read up, listen to audiotapes, take classes, tune in to online electronic chat rooms, visit other restaurants to collect clues. And you’ll need to keep doing such things to maintain your edge (as an opera singer or professional athlete does) until the day you hang up your corkscrew.

Nonetheless, you can become excellent in a nanosecond, starting with your first guest tonight. Simply picture yourself, even if it’s a very fuzzy picture, as the greatest waiter ever—and start acting accordingly. Put yourself in lights on Broadway, as a galaxy-class waiter; then perform your script with derring-do.

Does it sound wild? Silly? Naïve? Maybe, but it isn’t. The first 99.9 percent of getting from here to there is the determination to do it and not to compromise, no matter what sort of roadblocks those around you (including peers) erect.

The last 99.9 percent (I know it adds up to more than 100 percent—that’s life) is working like the devil to (1) keep your spirits up through the inevitable storms, (2) learn something new every day, and (3) practice that something, awkward or not and no matter what, until it’s become part of your nature.

What holds for the waiter also holds for the manager of the six-person department or the chief executive of the 16,000-person firm.

How long does it take you, as boss, to achieve world-class quality? Less than a nanosecond to attain it, a lifetime of passionate pursuit to maintain it.

Once the fire is lit, assume you’ve arrived—and never, ever look back or do anything, no matter how trivial, that’s inconsistent with your newfound quality persona.

Suppose you commit to achieving new heights in quality or service here and now. In your own mind, you’re an instant Nordstrom (retail) or Motorola (manufacturing). But your next task—dad-blamed real world—is to go through your boring in-basket.

What an opportunity! Respond to the first item that turns up as you imagine a Nordstrom or Motorola exec would.

A memo from a frontline worker complaining about a silly impediment to improvement? A request to change office-supply vendors? An irate note from a customer or distributor? “Nordstrom” it. “Motorola” it. Act out, in a small way, your Nordstrom-Motorola fantasy of matchless quality.

Sure, if you keep it up for even a few hours, people all over the organization will start looking at you oddly. You want them to, because you’ve achieved your first tiny victory. You, Ms. Planet-class Quality, are living a new life. Their misfortune is that they haven’t figured it out for themselves yet.

Does all this amount to a quarter-baked pep talk better delivered under a revival tent? Hardly. (And if you don’t believe me, ask a friend in Alcoholics Anonymous, perhaps the most effective change program on earth today.) You see, the deeper point is that you’ll either change in a nanosecond—or never. It’s true with booze, smokes, fat, and world-class quality. The determined shift of mindset is an all-or-nothing deal.

In case you can’t tell, I’m fed up to my eyebrows with execs (and folks of every other rank) who talk about how l-o-n-g it takes to achieve change. That’s pure rubbish. It takes forever to maintain change (“One day at a time,” according to AA); but it takes just a flash to achieve change of even the most ;profound sort.

One morning in Houston almost six years ago, I changed. I was a non-exerciser. But that day, for a lot of not very significant reasons, I went out at 5 a.m. and took my first, bumbling speed walk. Eleven minutes later (OK, more than a few nanoseconds), I was hooked. True, every day since I’ve fretted that I’ll renege. Exercise is a lifetime pursuit, which causes pain come days (e.g., as I write, it’s unseasonably cold, rainy, and getting late). But as of that morning in Houston, I am a no-baloney, world-class, rudely dogmatic exerciser.

Change is that simple. Honest.

2.

“Honor your errors. A trick will only work for a while, until everybody else is doing it. To advance ... requires a new game. But the process of going outside the conventional method ... is indistinguishable from error. ... Evolution can be thought of as systematic error management.”

Kevin Kelly

Out of Control: The Rise

of Neo-Biological Civilization

When, oh when, will we learn to honor error? To understand that goofs are the only way to step forward, that really big goofs are the only way to leap forward?

Bosses who don’t support the importance of failure are public nuisance No.1 in my book.

3. Attentiveness

The poet Mary Oliver, in her touching Mockingbirds, tells of an impoverished old couple who responded to the knock of strangers at their door. The poor folks had no worldly goods to offer the unexpected visitors, only “their willingness to be attentive.”

The unbidden guests turned out to be gods—who surprised their hosts by treating their attentiveness as the finest gift mere humans could have made.

I suspect that the story, with its small but grand revelation, resonates with most of us, and, paradoxically, especially so in these topsy-turvy times. Overwhelmed by new technologies, new competitors, new everything, we hold the gift of human attention—from the sales clerk or nurse who looks you directly in the eye, rather than conversing while staring blankly at the computer screen or medication tray in front of her or him—to be the most munificent of blessings.

But can we do more than nod our heads and mutter “Amen”? For starters, we can bring hard, cold statistical evidence to bear on this topic that might better seem the province of poets or Zen masters.

Consider research done by the Forum Corporation, which analyzes commercial customers lost by 14 major manufacturing and service companies. Some 15 percent of those who switched suppliers did so because they “found a better product”—by a technical measure of product quality, such as a greater mean time between failures or a lower defects score. Another 15 percent took off because they found a “cheaper product” somewhere else. Twenty percent of the lost customers hightailed it because of the “lack of contact and individual attention” from the prior supplier; and 49 percent left because “contact from old supplier’s personnel was poor in quality.”

[pic]

It seems fair to collapse the last two categories into one, after which we could say:

• 15 percent left because of quality problems

• 15 percent scooted because of price

• 70 percent hit the road because they didn’t like the human side of doing business with the prior provider of the product or service.

Which brings us directly back to the impoverished old couple and their “small” gift of attentiveness. In the age of email, supercomputer power on the desktop, the Internet, and the raucous global village, attentiveness—a token of human kindness—is the greatest gift we can give someone: anyone, including our American or Japanese or German customers for paper clips, hand and cheese sandwiches, jet aircraft engines, or $10 million lines of credit.

4.

Ellen Langer, a leading social psychologist, begins her book, Mindfulness, with a story about elderly nursing home residents who were given houseplants to care for and allowed to make some other minor decisions about their daily routine. “A year and a half later,” she writes, “not only were [the plant minders] more cheerful, active, and alert than a similar group in the same institution that were not given these choices and responsibilities, but many more of them were still alive. In fact, less than half as many of those decision-making, plant-minding residents had died as had those in the other group.”

What do nursing home residents have to do with business success? Everything. Langer offers a dramatic tribute to the power of personal engagement. It was good for the plants; it was even better for the people who got involved in their care. Well, people-nurturing has two sides, too—one for the nurtured and another for the nurturer. The phone call, the small courtesy, the warm words, are all modest acts of engagement that make customers feel good. That may not extend your life, but it will surely boost your business and make you feel a lot better about yourself—which, come to think of it, is probably a pretty good life-extending therapy.

5.

Terry Neil, managing partner of Andersen Consulting’s worldwide change practice, translates an old French saying as, “Change is a door that can only be opened from the inside.” He buttresses this assertion with the philosophy of Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz, “It’s not my job to motivate players. They bring extraordinary motivation to our program. It’s my job not to de-motivate them.”

Empowerment, Neill concludes, is not the things you do to or for people, it’s the impediments you take away, leaving space for folks to empower themselves.

So what, exactly, have you done today to remove obstacles to success from the path of the would-be heroes at the front line?

6.

Nothing is carved in stone. Nothing. Everything is written in sand and is likely to be erased or unrecognizably altered by the next wave or wind that sweeps over it. With that disclaimer out of the way, let me offer a few tentative truths that I’ve squeezed out of my life’s adventure:

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70 percent of lost customers hit the road not because of price or quality but because they didn’t like the human side of doing business with the prior provider of the product or service.

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