Archive for July, 2007

Seattle, WA – Healthcare Management Consultants with Prior Clini – ECG Management Consultants

July 24th, 2007

Healthcare Management Consultants with Prior Clini

Arlington, VA – Senior Compensation Consultant – Consulting Company- TheLadders Client

July 24th, 2007

Senior Compensation Consultant Chase Winters Worldwide (a leading retained executive search firm) is currently conducting a highly visible search engagement for a Senior Compensation Consultant for a premier global corporation (with offices in 46 cou

Liberation!The Situation Is Hopeless!Hooray!

July 24th, 2007

GE, by almost all measures, is the rare (only?) enormous American firm that has outperformed the stock market over almost a century. Hence the shock value of Sunday’s headline in the biz section of the New York Times: “Is GE Too Big for Its Own Good?” Observers, including many on Wall Street, are beginning to whisper, “Break it up,” following a half dozen years of flaccid performance.

The day before I’d been lecturing in Nairobi—and the first two rows of the amphitheater had included a staggering share of Kenya’s Big Company CEOs. My unrelenting message: Giant companies are stinkers when it comes to long-term performance.

A few of the slides I used:

“[Richard] Foster and his McKinsey colleagues collected detailed performance data stretching back 40 years for 1,000 U.S. companies. They found that none of the long-term survivors managed to outperform the market. Worse, the longer companies had been in the database, the worse they did.”—Financial Times

“The difficulties … arise from the inherent conflict between the need to control existing operations and the need to create the kind of environment that will permit new ideas to flourish—and old ones to die a timely death. … We believe that most corporations will find it impossible to match or outperform the market without abandoning the assumption of continuity. … The current apocalypse—the transition from a state of continuity to state of discontinuity—has the same suddenness [as the trauma that beset civilization in 1000 A.D.]“—Richard Foster & Sarah Kaplan, “Creative Destruction” (The McKinsey Quarterly)

“Of Korea’s Top 100 companies in 1955, only seven were still on the list in 2004. The 1997 financial crisis ‘destroyed half of Korea’s 30 largest conglomerates.’”—from “KET Issue Report,” Kim Jong Nyun

“I am often asked by would-be entrepreneurs seeking escape from life within huge corporate structures, ‘How do I build a small firm for myself?’ The answer seems obvious: Buy a very large one and just wait.”—Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics

“A pattern emphasized in the case studies in this book is the degree to which powerful competitors not only resist innovative threats, but actually resist all efforts to understand them, preferring to further entrench their positions in the older products. This results in a surge of productivity and performance that may take the old technology to unheard-of heights. But in most cases this is a sign of impending death.”—Jim Utterback, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation

“The more successful a company, the flatter its forgetting curve.”—Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad

“You don’t get better by being bigger. You get worse.”—Dick Kovacevich, CEO, Wells Fargo

“Despite a decade of banking mergers, there is no evidence that big banks are any more efficient or profitable than their smaller rivals.”—Financial Times, on possible Barclays-ABN Amro merger (“When it comes to asking the stock market whether bigger banks are better, the current answer is a resounding ‘no.”—Citigroup analysis, 2006)

“‘Good management’ was the most powerful reason [leading firms] failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.”—Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, on the conservatism that cripples very large firms

“Recently I asked three corporate executives what decisions they had made in the last year that would not have been made were it not for their corporate plans. All had difficulty identifying one such decision. Since all of the plans are marked ‘secret’ or ‘confidential,’ I asked them how their competitors might benefit from possession of their plans. Each answered with embarrassment that their competitors would not benefit.”—Russell Ackoff (from Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning)

One Kenyan CEO asked if I truly thought there was, effectively, no hope for the Giants. I wandered around the issue and concluded, “Yup, no hope.”

So what the hell was the point of the seminar, the point of my 7,000 mile trip, at least for the Big Co gang?

Plenty, I think.

That is “no hope” is a dire warning that typical, conservative Big Co strategies are indeed designs for disaster. And I think that is liberating. The message is, “The odds are stacked against you, hence you in effect have damn near nothing to lose—so swing for the fences and you at least up the odds a bit of performing well.”

I often say (and did again in Kenya) that I’ve learned but one thing in 40 years, since I began my management career as a military (Navy) construction engineer in Vietnam in 1966. And that is … “try stuff” … faster than the next guy. (“We have a ‘strategic plan.’ It’s called doing things.”—Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines.) And keep on tryin’ stuff.

Hence this “ultimate” slide on success and failure:

Life 101: A 40-year Reflection

Go on offense.
Give everybody a shot.
Decentralize.
Try a bunch of stuff.
Make it up as you go along.
Get some stuff wrong.
Laugh a lot.
Get some stuff right.
Who knows, you might get lucky …

Or:

Extract “lessons learned” or “best practices.”
Thicken the Book of Rules for Success.
Become evermore serious.
Enforce the rules to increasingly tight tolerances.
Go on defense.
Install walls.
Protect-at-all-costs today’s franchise.
Centralize.
Calcify.
Install taller walls.
Write more rules.
Become irrelevant and-or die.

Attached you’ll find a very brief PowerPoint, from the sub-section titled “Try It” in the section called “Innovation Tactics” in Part II of our Master Presentation (“Innovate. Or. Die.”)

Posted by Tom Peters |
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Flexible Payroll Solutions Meet the Diverse Needs of Small Businesses

July 24th, 2007

Paying employees is a challenge. This article looks at doing the task in-house and outsourcing. There is, of course, no “correct” answer on which approach to take. This article lays out some of the important issues.

Increase Lead-to-Sales Ratios with Effective Lead Qualification and Scoring

July 24th, 2007

It’s quality and not quantity when it comes sales leads. Following these steps will increase the percentage of successful calls by your sales staff.

Squeezing Pennies Out of Business Software Purchases

July 24th, 2007

From buying at the end of the fiscal year to doing as much as possible in-house to simply asking for lower prices, a company can save a lot by using its head.

Dallas, TX – PeopleSoft/Workday Financials Consultant – MiPro Consulting

July 24th, 2007

Are you ready to have some fun growing your career with one of the hottest consulting firms in the USA? Fresh, forward-thinking and fast-growing MiPro Consulting is looking for some serious talent to j

Chicago, IL – PeopleSoft/Workday Financials Consultant – MiPro Consulting

July 24th, 2007

Are you ready to have some fun growing your career with one of the hottest consulting firms in the USA? Fresh, forward-thinking and fast-growing MiPro Consulting is looking for some serious talent to j

Albany, NY – Architect – Stantec Consulting Services

July 24th, 2007

For Full Job Description and To Apply:

Company Description Stantec, founded in 1954, provides professional design and services in planning, engineering, architecture, surveying, and

Baltimore, MD – Peoplesoft HCM Consultants (Multiple Positions) – SigmaTek Consulting

July 24th, 2007

Peoplesoft HCM Consultants (Multiple Positions) TS63 PeopleSoft HR Senior Consultant Job Description : The PeopleSoft HR Senior Consultant (SC) will have Min. 4 yrs. experience implementing v8.x PeopleSoft HR, including eRecruitment and ePerformance,

Atlanta, GA – automation consultant – USA Consulting, Inc.

July 24th, 2007

automation consultant CA Automation Point installation and implementation CA Automation Point CA OPS/MVS

Atlanta, GA – Peregrine Asset Center Consultant – SigmaTek Consulting

July 24th, 2007

Peregrine Asset Center Consultant *Search and apply to over 5000 positions nationwide on SigmaTek?s website www.stcllc.com* Client of ours is looking for a Senior Peregrine Asset Management resource for a 4 month contract in Atlanta, GA. If intereste

Kenya 2007

July 23rd, 2007

Kenya, per my analysis, was the SIXTY-FOURTH country in which I have been lucky enough to present. And to say “the best of the lot” would be an insult to my many wonderful hosts, from OMAN to MAURITIUS to NEW ZEALAND to SIBERIA. But I’m tempted. I have rarely, if ever, had such a warm welcome (to Susan & me); I have rarely, if ever, had such wonderful interactions with seminar participants. So I’ll simply send along the slides—and offer a hearty “thanks and Godspeed” to my new friends from Nairobi, et al. (See you soon, I hope.)

[Slides from the event in Nairobi, where Tom spoke to a group from KPMG, are available with the links below.—CM]
Excellence. Always. Section One, KPMG, Nairobi
Excellence. Always. Section Two, KPMG, Nairobi

Posted by Tom Peters |
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Durham, NC – Software Developer/Consultant – Dynatech Consulting, Inc.

July 23rd, 2007

Dynatech Consulting is looking for an ambitious and strong software developer to fill a full time position with our firm. You will be working with some of the brightest minds in the field of system de

Boston, MA – SAP Basis Consultant with Portals Experience – LSI Consulting

July 23rd, 2007

LSI Consulting specializes in the SAP industry within the Higher Education, Government industries including the Public and Private Sectors. We are an SAP Partner currently seeking the following: SAP B

San Francisco, CA – Experienced Consultants – Consulting Company- TheLadders Client

July 22nd, 2007

Experienced Consultants Only Consultants Looking for a Life Outside of Airports and Hotels Need Apply Please do not apply to this position unless you have prior Big 5, National Firm or ERP/CRM Experience. Do you love

San Francisco, CA – Compensation Consultant – Consulting Company- TheLadders Client

July 22nd, 2007

Compensation Consultant Chase Winters Worldwide (a leading retained executive search firm) is currently conducting a highly visible search engagement for a Senior Compensation Consultant for a premier global firm (with offices in 46 countr

Los Angeles, CA – Compensation Consultant – Consulting Company- TheLadders Client

July 22nd, 2007

Compensation Consultant Chase Winters Worldwide (a leading retained executive search firm) is currently conducting a highly visible search engagement for a Senior Compensation Consultant for a premier global firm (with offices in 46 countr

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