Tom Peters is co-author of In Search of Excellence–the book that changed the way the world does business, and often tagged as the best business book ever. Almost 20 books and thirty plus years later, he’s still at the forefront of the “management guru industry” he single-handedly invented.
In those 35 years since writing In Search of Excellence, Tom has never stopped studying what’s new and making his best predictions for what’s to come next.
This conversation focuses all Tom’s knowledge on how to manage your business in this time of exponentially accelerating change. Not surprisingly, he has a great deal to say about people being the #1 thing you should be focusing on when striving for Excellence.
Sean Delaney: Tom, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?
Tom Peters: I’m doing… Well, anybody in these times who says, I’m doing fine, is either a liar or was born without a brain in ’cause things are as okay as they can be. That’s the farthest you can go.
All is not well.
Sean: You’re spot on there. We’re gonna have a little light to this. Hopefully people can walk away from this being able to be a little bit more tactile and understand the bigger grounds, but I would love starting somewhere…
Tom: Yeah, I completely agree with you in that regard.
Sean: But I thought of really fun jumping off spot would be around someone we both admire, and this is actually a former neighbor of years, and that’s the legendary for 49ers coach, Bill Walsh.
And when I bring up Coach Walsh’s name, I would love to just get your initial thoughts when you hear that name, what do you think about?
Tom: I think Bill Walsh and the Cowboys coach, Tom Landry. And I live in New England Patriots land now, and I completely split with Belichick after he lost the Super Bowl to the New York Giants and did not go shake hands with the winning coach. Because what I think of is I think of Walsh and I think of Landry, Landry always wore his funny little felt hat, dressed like a gentleman. And Walsh didn’t do that. He was more San Francisco, but his shirt was always neatly pressed, and I love it in general. You can be an incredibly vicious competitor and an extraordinary human being at the same time, and so I think about that with Walsh. Oh, boy. It’s so many things it relative to what I do for a living, and I have a Walsh quote in one of my books, and he said, “When you take over and the team, the thing that’s most important is getting the team culture right.”
And he’s saying it just as if it was a business, and to put oompf behind those words, when Walsh came to San Francisco, they were coming off a 2 and 14 season. Walsh’s first season was 2 and 14, he was working on other stuff, and his second season was 6 and 10, and his third season, he won the Super Bowl, but he was trying to get the bedrock right. As he said, I was trying to teach these guys that they were professionals. I don’t know whether this would work in 2020, but they had to wear ties when they were on the team bus and treat this like a professional and so on. So he was also the genius and all that.
The other thing I remember, which is kind of associated with the culture, is I was at a breakfast for non-profit, I was on the board of in Palo Alto, and I was sitting next to Bill, and I’m gonna get pieces of this wrong and NFL freaks who are watching are gonna get all over my case, but it was the year that I think Ryan Leaf got drafted ahead of Payton Manning and whatever. Leaf was gone in two years because he was just not a very good human being, and I remember saying to Walsh, I said, “You guys are supposed to be the world’s best people at picking talent. How could you f up that badly?” And he turned to me and he said, it’s really simple, he said, a lot of my peers get conned by arm strength and how far you can throw a football and they don’t pay enough attention to character, and which I thought was an absolutely wonderful answer. There’s another football quote like that, the famous University of Michigan football coach, Bo Schembechler and I remember I used, I used it in my book, he said, “When we went out recruiting, we were always looking for good people,” he said, “You didn’t have to be the super star, had to be good football player obviously, but we wanted good people,” and he said year in and year out, my good people beat these teams full of superstars, and he said, and even better than that, when they got out of school, they had much better lives after they got out of the world of football and the last one almost, if you’re human, it makes you just kinda wanna weap. The other one like that, just kind of sticking to football, which I hate to do, fortunately, my wife is out and she’s not in the house because she despises his football, and she would have turned off the tape recorded by now, but the other one, which is really wonderful and it’s all about leadership, and the parts of leadership I care about. Vince Lomabrdi, who is one tough ole nut for those whose football history goes back, Vince Lombardi said, and I believe this holds for any leader of anything, and it’s obviously true for elementary school teachers, he said, “You do not have to like all of your players. But you must love them.”
And it’s a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful statement.
And I think that’s true on… I got into, excuse the language, pissing contest on Twitter when, last week, when I said, your group of nine people are a family, in many respects, they’re a community and people jumped all over me and they said, I’ve only got one family and it’s my family, and then somebody came back with a great quote that says, “Family doesn’t have to do with blood, it has to do with how much you care for people,: and the quote was better than that, and I’m bastardizing it, I’m sorry to say. But that was the tone of it. And so a lot of the reason you and I are having this conversation is I really believe that at times like this point with this extraordinary thing going on around us, this thoughtfulness in care is the all important first 99%.
Sean: No, absolutely. And it’s funny you bring up treating people differently, and John Wooden brings that up, I remember in some of his books talking about his coaching philosophy there. You mentioned coaches relentlessly competitive, and I know you deem yourself as someone who’s also ferociously competitive. Did you always have that fire and that desire to be competitive?
Tom: Well, my mother did.
I read something somewhere about these parents who do awful things to get their kids into good schools, and one of them talked about, honest to God, I know I read this, this is not my aging mind, where you’re the teacher and you give little Johnny a bad grade, and the next thing you see is Johnny’s mother… Father’s, both, this is not a mother thing, Johnny’s mother and father’s lawyer comes into the classroom and wants you to raise the grade. And I saw that story, and I said to somebody, I said, I understand that. If I had written a paper in the seventh grade and I had gotten an A on the paper, I can imagine my mother running in to talk to the teacher and saying, “He did not work enough for an A, I want you to lower that grade.” And I’m sure I’m exaggerating, but only by the definition of a schmidgen.
I think she had a lot to do with it, and there are various reasons like that, that I would only tell my psychiatrist, but she was driven for me to succeed and… Yeah, she was a loving mother and various other things, the best thing incidentally, you are a northerner, and I was a Baltimorian and so I understand that, but… And this is what we’ve been talking about. This is not unrelated. I said this, my mother was born in Tidewater, Virginia, and I said to somebody, I know that my mother gave me a full dose of motherly love, but I said, right ahead of the motherly love thing for all of the problems I have with the South… Right ahead of the motherly a thing was good manners, because good manners will get you everywhere, good manners are like… I said to somebody, if you wanna be a cynic, good manners are like cheating. If you’re nice to people, they will become within your sway, I want to tell you one other good manners story, but none of this is frivolous, it has to do with what you and I are talking about. My mother did teach me those good manners, and about five years ago, I flew in from Boston or San Francisco or wherever to BWI, and I landed at BWI, 6:30 or 7 in the morning, and I had a rental car ’cause I was doing stuff, which is neither here nor there but the rental car area at BWI was pretty far away from the airport, and you need to get a bus to go out there. So bus comes along and opens its door, and I said, rather politely, I think, “Is this the bus to the rental car area?” And the gentleman who was driving the bus, who was African-American, I think in his mid-50s maybe, but he got a big smile on his face and he said, “Don’t we usually begin conversations like this with, ‘and how are you this morning?’”
And I looked at him and I said, oh shit, I came from around here, my mother’s hand is gonna reach down out of the heavens and praise the Lord and thank you times a million of reminding me of what I damn well should have done, but I love it. And it was the most pleasant voice known to human kind, it was… “Don’t we usually begin conversations like this with, ‘how are you this morning?’” But… And all this stuff, I’m not trying to pass their hour with little stuff. This is the big stuff, the little stuff is dorky things like strategy…
Sean: It’s the people, right?
Tom: Yeah, it’s all about people.
I was writing something and I said, when my last book came out, I did tons of podcasts and I said, all with incredibly talented people, and 90% of them started with, “Tom, will you write a lot about people?”
And I always wanted to say, well, what the f else is there to write about? And I just got into this on Twitter yesterday, and I wish I had the exact quote, but there was somebody in, a this is one of my high horses in general, and they said something about… And their heart was in the right place and the line with something like, “And people are your most important asset.”
And I went ballistic, I said, people are not in organizations’ assets. People are the organization. And I know it is an apparently trivial linguistic thing. One of the other things I wrote, was writing in the book, which I really believe is, I wanna shoot anybody who uses the term human resources or HR. I am not a human resource. When I was born on the 7th of November 1942, in the middle of the night, and I was an only child, my father came into the birthing room and turned to my mother and he did not say, “Oh Evelyn, finally we have our own little human resource.”
But he did not say that.
Sean: No, he didn’t.
Tom: But it’s a big… These are the biggest, the biggest of big deals, and also, I happen to believe for reasons of COVID and so on, but I also happen to believe that this stuff is the best defense against or offense relative to the incredible incursion of AI. You’re not gonna beat AI by being… There’s a wonderful term, and I don’t think it’s technical, and it’s AI versus IA. And AI is artificial intelligence, and IA is intelligence augmented, and that is using the tools to help you be more effective in your podcast or in pedaling whatever, and it’s a… So the title of my new book has an extreme humanistion. And I think, I don’t have any idea with the technology, what the hell’s gonna happen 25 years from now, but to get to 25 years from now, we’ve gotta get through the next 25 years or the next five years, or the next two years. And I’m pretty darn sure that really going the extra 20 miles on issues like design and people focus and so on is a good strategy.
Sean:b Then I’d love to get your take here in terms of as we move more towards tech, there’s gonna be a lot of engineering background type people, and we know a lot of times the soft skills aren’t there for them. How do we blend those two then as we go more towards the technology-focused company?
Tom: I wish I had it to read it to you, but there was an article in my new book, but didn’t unfortunately have… The timing was wrong, didn’t make it into the last book.
Google did a study of their top, two studies, one study, two pieces, top employees and top teams, and there were eight attributes associated with their top employees, and the first seven were all soft variables. Like listens to each other, listens is respectful, and so on. And then they did most innovative teams, and Google is one of those horrible places where people are assigned “I’m an A player or I’m a B player,” and what they found in this research, again, and it wasn’t close by a country 25 miles. The B player soft skills meant that the B player teams were wildly more inventive, innovative than the A player teams, and so it was Google’s big surprise. So the important… I’m going bananas on this right now, I believe that in hiring from 100% of slots including temps, first variable is EQ and empathy. Period.
And I’m trying to answer your question by the Google thing. And then another one, there’s a quote guy’s name is Peter Miller, and he had a fast-growing middle size biotech company called up Optinose and his one-liner to end all one-liners is, “We only hire nice people,” and he said… And what he said, which is the answer to your question, is he said there are a lot of jobs in a biotech company that required these arcane scientific skills. But he said, let’s take a degree, like I don’t even know the words, but some very fancy molecular biology degree, whatever that would be, he said, “Here’s the dirty little secret, there are actually a lot of people who have that degree. Don’t hire the assholes.”
And this case, and remember this is a biotech company and a damn good one, you’re Mr. Miller, you’re the CEO. I am the person you’re interviewing, and my technical background is making you weap, and so you and I have an interview, and you would give your left arm, Mr. CEO, to hand me the job offer on the spot, but their rule, which they never break is the person being interviewed must, after they finished with the big dudes, run the gauntlet, which is their term, not the generic term, and run the gauntlet means 10 to 15 interviews with people from all over the place. It could be the receptionist, it could be a junior person in the finance department, but at any rate, you’re gonna spend five or 10 minutes with 10 or 15 people after you finish with… After I finish with you, and any one of those 10 or 15 people, including the receptionist, has the ability to ding me and make me not get a job offer.
So yes, you need tech tools, but tech tools do not mean an inhumane environment, and I think a lot of one of the biggest problems we’ve got going now, and you could name a million of course, is I really think that Facebook’s misbehavior boggles the mind. And I think Mr. Zuckerberg is a little short on EQ to be very frank with you.
I wish him good health and I wish his family good health, but I wish we could transport him on one of Elon Musk’s spaceships to another planet.
I think what Facebook is doing is awful for humanity.
I just read a book, am reading it, it’s only five feet behind me… Oh, I remember the first word in the title, which is F*, whatever, whatever, it’s by the guy, Christopher Wylie, who was the super, super, super duper tech, who blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica and the misbehavior of these guys did just boggled the mind, but Zuckerberg and we’re not here to talk about Zuckerberg, but it was a Zuckerberg quote in a Vanity Fair argument, and I… And this is very, very close to accurate and exactly accurate on the important points, “I would never knowingly do anything illegal, but I live my life immorally.” He was a younger man then.
Sean: Says a lot though.
Tom: But I don’t care. I mean, that was the term. Welcome to Facebook.
Somebody was talking about their algorithms, and they said the algorithms are specifically designed to engender divisiveness because when you engender the divisiveness, you get more hits and they have more ad revenue, and anybody who others are sentences like that ought to be put in a straight jacket as far as I’m concerned.
Sean: So in terms of EQ, I know you went through that one biotech, what they’re assessing out, and this seems very easily fakeable, right? We’ve all been in those interviews where someone’s just putting on that smile, they’re doing everything… How then do we better protect ourselves as leaders of businesses to make sure that…
Tom: I’m not gonna give you the three-sentence answer, but it can be done.
For example, there is a group out of the University of Pennsylvania and they did this huge research project and it’s involved with home care, elderly care. I wish I knew the details. At any rate, their turnover varied between 50 and 75% per year, and they decided hiring practices ought to be authored, and they did incredible research, and it was a good University of Pennsylvania top flight research, etcetera. And they came up with the traits of good caregivers, and virtually all the traits were EQ-ish traits.
And I’ll say two things and then come back to the direct answer. After they change there, and what they said is, we stopped emphasizing college degrees and achievements like that and started emphasizing what kind of a human being you were. Their turnover went from 75% to 1.7%, and the hospitalization of their clients went down by two-thirds. It was unbelievable, but at any rate, to answer your question, one of the things they did is they had social mixers, and 25 candidates would come in and they were observing, do you listen when I’m talking? Do you do when we chat? Do you have a history of volunteering for the Red Cross? Do you show… Do you show community spirit? Do you show care as a human being? And they’re convinced, they spent forever on this damn thing, and they came up with seven or eight traits which in their opinion defined the empathy thing, and they focus on those traits specifically, but kind of more to your point. If we were talking about that degree, you would demand the piece of paper that proved that degree. Proving EQ is not how the hell I smile or don’t smile when I’m having my conversation. On all the lists of great healthcare institutions, Mayo Clinic usually comes out on top or very near the top, and a couple of friends of mine whose name I don’t remember, wrote a wonderful book called Management Practices of the Mayo Clinic. And here was my favorite one, you are… This is back to our nice again, dammit,you are the planet’s top neurosurgeon, and you are interviewing for a job at Mayo Clinic, and this is the indirect version of what was the question you asked, and you’re talking to me. One of the things that you have no idea that’s going on is that during the course of the conversation, I am literally, not figuratively, counting the number of times you use the word “We” versus the number of times that you use the word “I.” Do you talk about my team, we, our people were able to do this at the University of Florida and our research center, or do you say, “I was really able to get this thing going,” or what have you, and… So I think the real answer is relative to the EQ. You gotta take it seriously, and it’s not about do you smile during the damn interview, this is life and death.
A guy by the name of Blank, wrote a book on hire and Jeff Smart, and he said, hiring is the single most important thing that any leader does. And I always say at that point in my writing is, “Could you Mr or Ms. Boss? Could you literally call yourself a top flight hiring professional?” Because hiring is a thing, just like playing the cello, and you get good at it by studying it, by learning it. It’s just like listening. Sure, you got a genetic advantage or what have you, but fundamentally, these important tasks can be treated like professional tasks, and what does a leader to do for a living? Sure he hires people, and then this damn EQ thing to continue with this part of the discussion… Oh, my god, if EQ is not the first 10 traits when you’re promoting people and do a first-line management job, you are the world’s number one nitwit. There are a thousand tons of research evidence that say people do not leave companies because the company is good or bad. They leave companies because of their boss, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s Apple versus Joe and Harry’s broken down used car lot, you leave or don’t leave because of your boss and your first line boss.
And I was in the Navy for four years, and the Navy… The Navy is run by chief petty officers, the army is run by its sergeants. It’s not the officers. And this first line leadership… Again, the research you want a ton of research? It’s there. Quality first line leadership affects productivity, affects quality, affects innovativeness, affects turn over and you name it. And you don’t promote people. And again, we tend to do the opposite. I promote the sales person who’s had this great selling career to be the sales boss, and he is the worst human being God ever put on Earth in terms of that job, so you can… EQ is not some little, let’s focus on… And so, not at all, you can define it as well as you can define the parameters of what’s under the hood of your car or the software code that’s under the hood of your car.
Sean: No, I asked the question, I didn’t want those quick hit takeaways, and I love how you bring so much light and attention to this ’cause it is vital. It is with the most important thing, and I think few people are putting the attention to it. And I think that’s a big reason we see unhappy people in the workplace and more turnover, so I’m so glad you put that much behind that one…
Tom: And that number to go with what you just said. And this is so fascinating to me because it’s a virtually no variance around the entire world, somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 75 people are not engaged, 60 to 75% of people who are not engaged with their job and the lovely thing since I talked to a lot of international audiences, it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about Dubai, France, Japan, the United States, or wherever it is, it’s always that same number. Two-thirds of people are not engaged and it’s a double tragedy.
It’s sad for the person. And it’s also sad for the effectiveness of the organization. I like to say to people, you know, I’m glad that you love your family, but unless you were born with a silver spoon, the thing that you are going to spend the most significant share of your adult waking hours at is your job.
And if you piss away from a human standpoint, your job life, you are literally statistically pissing away your life, and I don’t think that’s an extreme statement. You know, I didn’t get the silver spoon. I went through college by swearing to the Navy I would give them four years of service and waiting on waiting on tables and washing dishes, and so or… And it’s not just the family part, it’s just saying statistically, you’re gonna spend most of your hours at work, and if they’re nightmare showers, I’m sad for you, I’m sad for the company, I’m sad for the world, but…
Sean: Yeah, It’s a terrible tragedy to see.
And one thing I can’t help but notice right now is the amount of available resources you have in your head. Obviously the library behind you, you’re clearly very well read. What is that learning process like for you? Because you seem to have an exorbitant amount of information piled up in that head of yours.
Tom: Well, let’s start with one thing, which is a little bit pertinent at the moment, part of it obviously is I chose my parents well, and I arrived with a reasonably decent EQ.
There’s been all this talk and I’ll come back to your point, and some people are offended by the term white privilege. I have got enough white privilege to sink a fleet of ships.
I said, You wanna know my secret to success? I am gonna tell you… Brilliant choice of parents. I was born in ‘42, I came into the world as a white male Protestant American, and that was the all important first 99%, and the rest has been details. And if you don’t think so, you are a blooming idiot or seven other words that I would love to use to describe you. White male Protestant American of intelligent hard-working parents. You take that set of variables and it would have been real hard for me to screw it up in many, many respects, and that’s really important, but the reason that triggers in, we started out with my mother’s rather urgent need for me to achieve. She also made me a reader. She was shoving history books, kids history books down my throat by the age of five. I was at dinner a couple of years ago with a guy who is a very, very, very big deal investment banker, no it was not Warren Buffett, but very, very big leagues, and it was a private dinner, so I’m not gonna use his name, but we were chatting about God only knows what he said to me, he said, “Tom, what do you think the number one failing is of CEOs?” And I was either born or whatever as a smart ass, and so I said, “Well, I can think of 50 things, but I’m not sure I can pin it down to one.” And he looked at me, he didn’t look at me cruelly, he just looked at me and he said, “Number one failing in CEOs is they don’t read enough,” and you could have heard that proverbial feather drop. I was just in shock at what he said. And so I think it, Charlie Munger, who is Buffett’s number two, once said, the number one thing that Warren does is read.
And so I think continuing education is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly important, and so I believe I really felt two or three years ago that I was getting way behind the beam with the new technology, even though I was trained as an engineer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I basically took a year off and read about artificial intelligence. It does not make me an expert, but it means that I can understand experts when they’re talking and know enough so read, read, read, read, read. That is a huge message that will come out of my mouth, a student for life or else. So that’s my secret, I was reading by five and I never stopped.
The other thing I would say, which is related, but not quite directly related, is I think there’s a subset of my reading secret, and that is I read broadly. I read a lot of fiction, I read a lot of… A lot of history, biographies and so on, which takes me to another point. I’ve got a product development team of 20 people, and boy, do I ever mean this and I wish I could scream it louder, on my 20-person team I want at least one philosophy major, one music major, one theater major, one history major, and a few people who know them one-on-one equals two.
Diversity of thought is the number one secret to innovative success, and there is absolutely no issue about that whatsoever. There’s a guy who, Scott Page is his name, and I don’t remember his book title, but the bottom line was diversity trumps ability, and the kind of research he did was you got a group that is dealing with a very complicated problem, and one group is a group of experts, and the other group, is a random group kind of taken of the streets, albeit obviously, they have to be articulate at some level, the non-expert group always beats the expert group, and it’s just… You’re coming to things from different angles, and the best of us are incredibly narrow-minded, which… And then you can come back at me on the question, which is one other thing that just flew into my mind, and we probably have a lot of people who are leaders listening to us. I am going to share with you one of the most important secrets. Your self-perception of yourself is wrong, period. All stop, not kind of wrong, wrong. People’s self-perception is so badly out of whack it isn’t even funny, and I’ll give you one quantitative point of proof and then one horrible point of proof. The quantitative point of proof is researchers, we’re researching in a meeting, and during this hour-long meeting, they were counting interruptions, okay. With 20 people at the table that said. After the meeting, they went out to the boss and they said, how many times did you interrupt people, and how many times were you interrupted? And I’m not gonna get the number right, but I’m gonna get the directionality exactly right. So the boss said I was probably interrupted eight or nine times, and I do remember one time, I think I interrupted once, I may have interrupted twice. He missed 180 degrees. He had interrupted nine times and he had been interrupted, had been interrupted one time and he wasn’t a liar and he wasn’t trying to suck up to me as the researcher, he believed it. And that is the nature of the beast.
The worst, the worst one, this happens to be a good friend, which is a story, obviously, which won’t include a name, you work for a big company. Very successful, and he was headed… His IQ was about 800, and he was sharp as a tack and so on, and he was being potentially groomed for a pretty big job, and when you get to senior management in any big company, it’s 98% relationships and politics, politics and the good sense of the word, not the bad sense of the work. And so they went out, they had somebody work with him, and it was a variation on the same theme of the so-called 360 evaluations, and this is honestly a tearjerker, and it is for me because he’s a close friend. He thought that he was respected and borderline loved by his people, and they hated his guts. He was rude, he interrupted, he didn’t get him the time of day, he was always short. I guess it would be an exaggeration to say he was off 180, but he sure was all for 170 and needles to say he didn’t get the promotion, but it was tragic.
But in general, the guy who invented the EQ, Daniel Goldman has got, I think, an entire book on this topic, but… And several leadership people, a bunch of leadership people I respect, I think Marshall Goldsmith was one of them, have said that managing yourself is the single most important thing that a leader does. And the significant part of that is knowing how you affect other people and you’re bad at it. I’m bad at it, we’re all bad at it, and how you get the good feedback on it is a discussion of another day, but it’s just so hugely important.
Sean: Did you have a wake-up moment in your career when you realized your self-perception on yourself was totally off?
Tom: I did, and I think it was a wonderful boss who I had when I was at McKinsey, and as you said, I think in the very first question, I’m a pretty driven person, and of course, most people at McKinsey are driven, but I remember one time, and this was a God blessing was over, well, in San Francisco, so it was over Chardonnay, not beer, over a glass of wine, he said, “You don’t have any idea how pushy you are.”
And I said, “No, I just, I’m trying to get things done.” He said, “There are ways to get things done, and it does not mean running over people as if you were a Peterbilt truck,” and it wasn’t that I was terribly rude, it was just… I was always in a rush, I was always in a hurry, and I wasn’t as respectful as I might have been. And it was honestly, it was probably one of the 10 best days of my life to have gotten that feedback, and when he said it, a pun self-reflection. I knew he was right.
I came pretty close, I think to doing a 180 because I was embarrassed, I was literally sick at my stomach, and I got it. And then I went back to the power house mother of mine and shared it with her and she said, “You should have known that.”
Listen, my mother, her first name was Evelyn, and she was referred to as the Evelyn.
Can I tell you a story that’s just a wonderful story?
Sean: Please.
Tom: So it’s related to what you’re talking about.
My speakers bureau had its 25th universe or something. Now, they were moving into a new building.
And then the speakers bureau represented people like Margaret Thatcher, both Bushes, etcetera, etcetera, so reasonably high-end crew. They had a welcome, a house warming party for the new meeting, the new building.
And my mother lived nearby, the speaker’s bureau is in Washington, and she was an Annapolis, and she was friends with the guy who runs the speakers bureau, Harry Rhodes, and so I invited her with me and one of the people who was there was General Powell. And my mother, who’s also brassy, goes up to General Powell, as only my mother could do, and goes, “General Powell, it’s nice to meet you, but I did not really come here to meet you, I came here to meet Alma.” Mrs. Powell. Powell, to his everlasting credit, looks my mother in the eye and said, “Evelyn, I knew you were coming and I asked Alma to stay home tonight.”
I was off to do an interview somewhere, I think it was out in Baltimore or Washington, so I left early, my mother stayed around. They had dancing. She was probably 91 or 92 and her legs were bad and she had a walker. They had dancing and honest to god, General Powell goes over to my mother and said, “Evelyn,” this is whatever comes out of the Bible somewhere, goes over to my mother and says, “Evelyn, put the walker down, you and I are going to dance.” But what an incredible human being he is, and I just needed to tell the story because I needed to tell the story.
And particularly, which is… And we’re not getting political here, particularly because General Powell was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the current General Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was the one who went and fatigued at Lafayette Park in Washington. I wrote General Powell a note after that happened, and I said, “I would really love to be introduced to General Milly.” Because I would have the opportunity for him to put his hand out to shake and I would not shake his hand, so when he went into Lafayette Park like that, he absolutely negated my two years in Vietnam, and he really did.
There was a time during the Vietnam War, my uncle was a Marine Corp general, and General David Shoop was the commandant of the Marine Corps in the Marine Corp has a headquarters now where the commandant lives called 8th and I in Washington. And General Shoop was being interviewed on television at 8th and I, and there were protesters who were marching up and down the street, and so the interviewer looks at General Shoop and he said, General Shoop, “What do you think of these protesters?” And Shoop looks at him without breaking stride and said, “What do I think? I think that’s why we’re fighting a war in Vietnam so that they can march outside and my window.”
Oh my God, is that I’m talking saying that to you and honestly brings tears to my eyes, and that’s what I said now about this thing I… General Milly through my two years in Vietnam away when he went into Lafayette Park himself. I never forgive the guy. I hope he never gets COVID. I hope his family members don’t get COVID, cousins don’t get COVID. I never wish people ill health, but I do hope that god gets him a tenth ring in hell where he spends eternity.
Sean: This makes me wonder then, you’ve been around some of the best of all time, and I’m assuming you’ve taken a lot of those skills, what skill or mindset of yours do you just find hardest to pass on to others?
Tom: I guess, which gets us back to hiring, promoting and so on. I guess it’s Vince Lombardi.
You do not need to like your players, but you must love them. Because of COVID, so on, my new book, one of the things I’m writing about as an organization as a community, I was defining manager at one point, and I said the definition of a manager is someone… And this is exactly the correct word choice, who is desperate, for each of the 23 people who report to him to grow and to succeed, and desperate to have that happen, and that’s hard to pass on. Particularly to the people that make the same mistake I did and got an MBA because that’s not what they teach you at business school, and that’s a… This is what they teach or professional schools in general, but don’t get me going on that one. I will let you get me going on that one.
I was a young junior officer in the Navy. I was a Navy CB, which is Combat Engineers, my plane lands in the middle of the night and Danang, Vietnam. And the next morning, I’m in charge because I’m an officer, in charge of a 12-person detachment. The reality, of course, is the chief runs the detachment. Technically and legally, I was responsible for that group of 12 people, and I graduated from Cornell University, graduated from Cornell University with honors, graduated as a civil engineer, couldn’t have had a better education. And as I said to somebody, I could have redesigned the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge blindfolded with my hands tied behind my back, and what was my level of knowledge about leadership? Zero. And I am not because we’re transmitting to our fellow human beings, I’m not gonna use the word, but the way we serve as we went over for nine, we came home for three and went back for another nine months. When I got home, I went to Ithaca, and I still don’t understand how I had the nerve to do this, and I walked into the Dean’s office and I looked him in the eye and I said, you F’d me. And believe me, I didn’t say F’d. I said, You F’d me over. You gave me a brilliant technical education and you did not give me any preparation for the real world, and proof of the pudding, I went over in ‘66 to Vietnam, so we are 54 years past that, and I am as pissed off at what Cornell didn’t do for me in 2020 as I was in 1966. And so the point is, that’s the…. Go to that and think about technically training people… And I had this one, my wife and I used to, it won’t happen any time soon, go to New Zealand for a couple of months in the winter, and I teach at the Auckland business school, and I had a room full of 30 and 31-year-olds, I was teaching in organizational effectiveness, a lot of more Chinese as thinking about the whole thing. So Europe, French, British or Chinese or American engineering or technical graduate, if you’re worth a salt, a salt, if you are worth, or whatever, a dime, by the second year, you’ll be leading a project team. You can’t help it, I don’t care, a three-person team, four week assignment, you will be in a leadership position and in leadership, people are the ball game. The all important first 100%, and the technical stuff is not how you create a great team, so…
Don’t ask me that question. It’s ridiculous. I’ve given 2,500 speeches, I’ve written 18 books and I still can’t communicate to people that people come first.
Don’t ask me, I’ve obviously gotta be the world’s shittiest and exhausted person on Earth. And I figure 7,500 flight legs and I still haven’t gotten through the more than one-eighth of 1%, so don’t ask me your stupid damn question.
It’s a great question, it’s the best question.
I said to somebody, if you wanna understand my work, let me tell you the educational requirements. You must have a signed off certificate of graduation from the fourth grade, and if you’ve got that, you can understand anything that’s important in my work. And it’s really… I just wanna say one other thing in that regard, it is related to all this, and I just think this is so important that it’s important in terms of what’s going on now. Somebody on Twitter said Elon Musk is one of the two greatest people in the world, and my response, and I thought about it, I said I admire Mr. Musk, who would, despite his many, many flaws, and I said, let me tell how much I admire him. I admire him almost as much as I admire a truly committed third grade teacher who significantly changes the life of 25 kids every year. She comes in number one, he can be second if he needs to, but she’s my hero.
And it gets back this management thing again, call it that teacher or call it the boss that people quit if he’s not good or she’s not good. A good manager, and I don’t mean to become CEO of a giant company, a good manager can change dramatically far more lives than the most skillful surgeon in the United States of America, if not the world. If I have you working with me for two years and you come out with a different attitude, new skills, ready to take on the world, that’s more than any surgeon can do in the most important respects.
It just reminds me of a little story, but it’s all related to this. There was a high tech chemistry company near me, when I lived in Palo Alto, it was called Raychem, and there was this one gu, who just had wild success. And somebody said, “You wanna know what Jake’s number one success thing is?” And I said, “Sure.” I’m working for Jake, and I’m really doing a top flight job. And he comes up to me one day and he said, have I got a deal for you? I say, yeah, tell me all about it. He said, the real reality is that given our staffing, I am not gonna be able to promote you within the next couple of years. And you are too good to be in the job you’re in. And so he said, I went out and talked to a couple of my buddies, and I have found you the most fabulous slot in Dave Smith’s operation known to humankind. He said, you can stay, I’d love you to stay. But I really want you to be able to go where you ought to be able to go. So in other words, he is giving up an extraordinary piece of talent because he considers his success to be whether the men or women who work for him are more successful because they were in his presence. And that to me is just pure, unabashed, unadorned beauty in terms of leadership. That’s what it’s all about.
I’ll tell you another way to look at it, which in the middle of, again, COVID-19 and racial injustice is really incredibly important. New York Times columnist, David Brooks wrote a column maybe a couple of years ago now, and he talked about what he called Resume Virtues and Eulogy Virtues.
Resume Virtues are, he graduated second in his class at the University of Michigan, he was promoted four times in the first nine years, he’s ended up very financially successful. And so on those are Resume Virtues. The Eulogy Virtues are obviously what they say about you at your funeral. He went out of his way to help other people, he did this, he did that, he’s whatever. We have a neighbor right now who’s renting a property from us, and his wife has had a severe illness for 30 years, and he’s got… He just deals with it every day for 36 months, and that’s the stuff that counts, and so particularly… I wanna read you something that will take less than 30 seconds, and I am doing these things on leadership in the time of COVID-19. And so this is my six leadership requirements for a leader of anything, be kind, be caring, be patient, be forgiving, be positive and walk in the other person’s shoes.
That’s your job.
And I really wanna say that every leader who’s listening to us, watching us, whatever, what you have done in the last 120 days and what you will do in the next 120 days, will define the quality of your contribution as an adult human being. This is a ball game. How you behave now, that is the marker, my dearly beloved friends.
Now, we’ll see, but this is the ball game, how do you behave? Which doesn’t mean that if I have a restaurant and the restaurant is empty, that I can afford to keep all my employees on, but when I can do is afford to do iw I was just reading about the other day, the guy who had a little thing like a restaurant, and he mortgaged his house, he mortgaged his house so that he could help the people who work for him. He couldn’t make their life perfect or what have you, but he was able to keep a few of them on and he was able to… And so many things you could do. Somebody said, well, what can you do? And I say, well, one of the things, this guy I… We went out and he found an expert, and the expert was an expert in things like, how do you apply for unemployment benefits? How do you beat the bureaucracy or stay ahead of it with all this stuff? And he gave them that kind of counseling because you’ve read it, I’ve read it, the number of people who have just been completely flummoxed by the bureaucracy associated with getting the check or whatever else it was, but I just thought that was… I thought that was beautiful.
Sean: Yeah, that’s incredible insights. So clearly concise and summarize there. I think that’s a great place to end, but I need to bring up a few things that I certainly took away from this, obviously people, first and foremost, they are everything. I love the competitive spirit, how that drives your life-long learning process, the competition you bring in, and then I think a point that you brought up that just really stuck with me there is how anyone can have a tremendous impact on the people they come in contact with.
You don’t have to be a CEO, a surgeon, you can be just that person in the community, and I absolutely love that, Tom. And I need to do one other thing because your book transformed me. The week I read that I was a fundamentally different person when I read In Search of Excellence, so I just want to say this has been years in the making, so I just wanna say thank you for that. It really did have that much an impact on me, and then your work after that, so I really appreciate it.
Where else can we have the listeners stay connected with you? Find out more about you and your work?
Tom: Easiest can be TomPeters.com. We’ve got… I’ve done several interviews like this, the links to the mre all there. 20 years worth of my slides are there. Papers are there. We give away everything. And so, at TomPeters.com, and we’ve worked very hard to make it user-friendly, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job, so… Welcome aboard.
There’s a related website called excellencenow.com that has some specialty stuff, but you’ll find a link to that too. So love to love to have anybody visit us and it’s all there, it’s all yours. Not a single proprietary item on the item.
Sean: We’ll certainly have all that linked up, but Tom Peters, I really truly from the bottom of my heart can’t thank you enough for coming on What Got You There.
Tom: No, it’s been an incredible pleasure and all the people who are watching us, or listening to us, this really is a wonderful time to make an extraordinary difference to the fellow human beings that if you’re a leader, probably a high percentage are of something or a non-leader is… That leadership is everybody’s business.
Leadership is, I said to somebody, want to know the definition of leadership? On a crappy day, when the sleet is coming down in Boston, it’s coming to work with a smile. That’s an act of leadership and making people just feel a teeny bit better.
Sean: Tom Peters, thanks again.