Master of reinvention!


GOD! If I could have my time over, I'd be a management guru! Still could be, in fact! God, there's a thought! Wonderful! The exclamation marks, for anyone familiar with pundits who charge the earth to tell bosses how to run their businesses, will need no introduction. They're the trademark - if he could patent them he would! - of Tom Peters, the most successful management theorist of them all, US co-author of the ground-breaking and best-selling In Search of Excellence and now his latest work, Re-imagine!, sure to be in executive stockings this Christmas.

As a measure of Peters' success, consider that even 11 years ago he was charging $50,000 for a two-hour presentation. He's widely regarded as the world's highest-paid management consultant, inventor of such business buzzwords as the nanosecond and liberation management, propounder of such revelatory thoughts as 'flexibility is key', and 'the only thing that is certain is uncertainty!'.

He's the prophet of the new way of doing business, of dressdown Friday, of wow!, of Silicon Valley, of companies using the web and e-commerce to reinvent themselves.

Ah reinvent! It's a tompeters! (as his website address labels him) favourite, as in a quote he frequently uses from an American army chief: 'If you don't like change, you'll like irrelevance even less!'

For anyone who has had to deal with management consultants, as I have, Peters' exhortations are very familiar. They love their little phrases such as 'out of the box', 'blue sky', 'beacon personality'. The list is being added to each day as they find new ways of extracting money from businesses that can't think for themselves. And at their peak is Peters, probably the propagator of more twaddle than anyone on the planet.

To understand where he is coming from and how he is received, it's necessary to enter the mindset of an American. Difficult, I know, but possible. We once exchanged houses with some people in California. In the downstairs loo there were self-help books. Next to and all round the bed there were self-help books. Every day, the postman dropped off more catalogues for self-help books.

Turn on their PC and you were immediately hit with spams, promoting more self-help books. What was incredible to this admittedly jaundiced English eye, was the sheer banality of it all. What to eat on planes to avoid being sick (clue: not something greasy), where to sit in case the plane crashes (clue: near the exit).

The effect of reading all this stuff was two-fold. It filled me with terror, made me believe I really was going to meet a grizzly on our travels and that the suspension bridge really would collapse, leaving our car teetering on the brink. But it also provided total reassurance. Hope is what it gave - hope that if things got bad, there was a way out. If my sexual performance declined any further, I could turn to page whatever and problem solved. If my children had head-lice, there was the answer.

So it is with Peters. He is to businesses what Robert Atkins is to the obese, a panacea for the difficult times in which we live. This is favourite Peters territory. Now, today, is much more uncertain than it ever was, hence you need him to lead the way.

Forget the fact that businesses have been around since man first started selling spare meat and crops, and that the times they are always a-changing. For Peters in Reimagine!, there's nothing like the present for causing executives to choke on their Special K and, well, rush to sign up for his seminars and order more copies of his seminal work.

He has gone big this time round - this is his 11th book - on 11 September and how the hijackers' success proved two things: how organisations that don't change, like the CIA and FBI, can be humbled; and how a 'virtual organisation' like al-Qaeda can humble them.

The old ways have gone and, says Peters, quoting Paul Allaire, former head of Xerox, 'we're in a brawl with no rules.' All across America and in this country, too, managers will nod in agreement. It's tough, and their lives are tough but Tom will show them how.

All of which wouldn't matter if his own track record wasn't so, er, suspect. In Search of Excellence, published in 1982, selects 43 companies for special acclaim, dubbing them the Golden 43.

Many of them have fallen by the wayside. He promoted dotcoms but failed to foresee that the bubble would grow and then burst. Does Peters turn off his keyboard and stop writing, does he cease ranting to delegates at conferences (his stage persona is not unlike a Southern Bible-basher and is as much to do with his fame as his books, with him likening his performances to those of a rock star)? Absolutely not.

Does he use his mistakes to earn even more money? You bet. Take his third book, Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution. It begins 'there are no excellent companies', which is at odds with his heralding of the Golden 43 in his first effort.

But hey, as he points out and has pointed out for years, life is all about change. Things change, don't they? The dotcom bubble was merely change at a furious pace, so fast that the rest of the economy couldn't keep up.

He was born in Baltimore, the son of a 'typical employee of that era: 44 years with one company, the Baltimore Gas & Electric Company', went to Cornell University and served in Vietnam, in the US Navy's construction unit, the Seabees.

As one US commentator wrote: 'Ask Peters about his experience in Vietnam and he'll tell you not about napalm and body bags but about how he induced his work platoon to shatter all hut-building records by promising beer busts and days off.'

After military service he completed his schooling, studying for an MBA and then a PhD at Stanford. After becoming a consultant in the Washington office of Peat Marwick Mitchell, he worked on the US government's anti-narcotics policy. In 1974, he left the East Coast for California and the San Francisco office of McKinsey & Co.

In those days, US business was reeling from the Japanese onslaught. They were at a loss as to how to respond, and turned to management consultants for guidance.

Known as 'the firm', McKinsey was in the vanguard and Peters, who held the title of 'principal practice leader in organisational effectiveness' was the man. Together with a colleague, Bob Waterman, he put his experiences and ideas into a book, In Search of Excellence. Originally intended mainly for in-house consumption, the book was in the right place at the right time and took business by storm, selling more than five million copies.

Executives still cling to the headings from that book: 'bias for action; stay close to the customer; autonomy and entrepreneurship; productivity through people; hands on, value driven; stick to the knitting; simple form, lean staff.'

Others are less easily impressed. One reviewer described Peters and Waterman as being 'lost in a syntactical fog', another said their arguments were based on anecdotes, not hard research.

The pair made their fortunes. Waterman took the money and more or less retired; Peters continued to plough the furrow they had created, founding his own consultancy, Tom Peters & Co, churning out books and videos, and giving his barnstorming lectures.

In Re-imagine! he quotes Waterman as saying: 'Tom's not happy unless he's madder than hell about something.'

It's hard to see why he should be so worked up. He's got a 1,000-acre farm in Vermont and another home on an island off Massachusetts. But he says, 'I'm madder than hell. I'm mad that I have been screaming and yelling and shouting about bankrupt business practices for 25 to 30 years, mostly to no avail.'

The suspicion that he shouts! (every chapter in the new book starts off with a 'Rant') to earn more money, won't go away. After all, he tells chief executives that if they 'want to understand business and run a business well, read Chekhov, not [Peter] Drucker [another, more cerebral and less populist management guru] and Peters. I believe it. What you learn from decent novelists is the richness and the chaos.'

He wants his tombstone to read, 'Thomas Peters - he was a player.' He was that, all right. Whether he was any good is a different matter.

Master of reinvention!

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