SmartBiz RSS FEED September 24th, 2007
So as I commence my own personal SEO project -- with a goal of approving my personal search ranking to generate more *business* (not mere ego-gratification) -- one of the first questions has to be: how much is too much?tom@tompeters.com September 24th, 2007
Who is the Number One exporter in the world?
Who has (probably) the highest wages in the world (not CEO "wages"!)?
If you answered that it was a nation of 83 million folks in Western Europe—namely Germany—you'd be correct.
Why?
If you answered Siemens you'd be wrong.
So, too, BASF—wrong.
Or Commerzbank—wrong again.
If you answered "Mittelstand firms" you would be spot on!
But I'm getting ahead of myself ...
Last week's BusinessWeek featured the best companies to go to work for as a fresh-caught college grad. Deloitte was #1 (I'm a Deloitte fan, especially their program for retaining women and getting them into senior leadership roles, but best in the U.S.?). The likes of Google was on the list, too. But, to me, personally, not a damn company on the list ought to be on the list—that's a little heavy-handed, but not by much.
Why, oh frigging why, is it always the Gargantuan Companies (because they are the magazines' advertisers??) on such lists (repeat, this week's Fortune has a biggie on the best leader development programs—100% monster institutions again) and not any of America's wonderful middle-sized companies?
About a year after In Search of Excellence appeared (October 15, 1982), my partners, Bob LeDuc and Nancy Austin (my coauthor on A Passion for Excellence) and I decided to launch a series of 4-day intensive workshops on implementing the main ideas in Search. We called them "Skunks Camps" (after Lockheed's renegade "Skunkworks"—look it up in Passion, or on the Web), and held them 100 miles south of home (Palo Alto), at a lovely spot on the Pacific called Pajaro Dunes.
Considering the firms in Search, 100% Big Dudes (who else would McKinsey guys feature?), it was obvious to us that our participants would be, say, VPs or EVPs of Fortune 500 companies.
Nope!
We had a few F500 denizens—mostly from Search companies such as 3M and J&J. The rest? American "Mittlestand":
Frank Perdue, and son Jimmy, of Perdue Farms. ("It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.")
Tom Malone, president of the stellar textile firm (and, arguably, inarguably to me, America's quality leader) Milliken & Company.
Don Burr, founder of People Express.
Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza.
Stew Leonard, and son Stew Jr, of Stew Leonard's.
Hal Rosenbluth of Rosenbluth International, the pathbreaking travel services firm.
John Fisher, the acclaimed IT guru from a much smaller Bank One of Columbus.
John McConnell of the steel's Mittelstand star, Worthington Industries.
Bob Buckman of the Memphis specialty chemical firm, Buckman Labs—Bob almost single-handedly invented what we now call (and genuflect to) "knowledge management."
And so on.* (*Some "troubles," for sure, at Stew Leonard's and People Express—but absolute pathbreakers at the time, 1984.)
Me?
I fell in love with these guys!!
Talk about a tough audience! No bullshit tolerated—and if they heard something good, it was launched 3,000 miles away in the likes of Salisbury, MD (home of Perdue), the day after it was discussed at Pajaro Dunes. E.g., Frank P liked Tom Malone's description of Milliken University, about the first of the corporate "universities," and got up the next day at 4 a.m. PST, called Salisbury, and launched Perdue University.
Hence, I've had a soft spot for the likes of these folks since 1984—and as time has passed I have come to appreciate the likes of them, and the likes of the techie start-ups from "the Valley," too, as the true engines of our economy.
And, to this day they are unsung!
I was so taken, that on the advice of the fellow who headed our European operations, Lennart Arvedson, I decided to explore this odd German phenomenon, called the Mittelstand. To make a long story as painless as possible, a year or so later I could be found in Germany on a three week TV shoot—for a program on this "Mittelstand phenomenon." It was by far the best show I've ever done, among a dozen or so, though the "obscure" topic meant less attention than for most of the others.* (*You'll find the stories in print in my Liberation Management.)
These Mittelstand firms tend to ... DOMINATE (exactly the right word) ... high-end niche markets. The three we featured in our show "The Mighty Mittelstand: The 'Secret' to Germany's Leadership of the World in Exports" (yes, they led then, too—including, amazingly, textile exports!) were:
Playmobil (part of Brandstatter Enterprises), the peerless toy makers; Trumpf, the high-end machine tool superstar; and Rationale, supplier of tippy-top high-end cooking equipment (the "combi-cooker") to most of the high-end restaurants in the U.S. and Europe.
Each tallied a few hundred million dollars in revenue, and all three were growing nicely. Oddly enough, to this day I think I'm the only American "management guru," prominent or otherwise, who has studied these firms—I guess when people see the astounding German export figures, they assume it was Siemens or BMW or the tooth fairy, and leave it at that.
The point of all this is to insist that there are thousands of Fab Firms out there that are really worth working for when one exits university—focused on product, surviving only by continuous innovation, manageable in size, meritocratic to a fault (they can't afford not to be), and providing incredible opportunities to get ahead quickly. The chief problem is, the youngster has to find 'em; they aren't among the Gargantuans who make it easy by showing up with donuts at the college employment center.
Oh dear, I do love, love, love Canada's London Drugs (beating the hell out of their new opponent, Wal*Mart, with 4X Wal*Mart's sales per square foot) and Canada's Cirque du Soleil; Connecticut's $50 million+ Basement Systems (the basement mold and dampness removal superstar; founder Larry Janesky's book, Dry Basement Science, is edging up to 150,000 copies sold—no kidding, I carry it around with me as an icon to what's possible, anywhere and everywhere); Ralph Stayer's Johnsonville Foods; David Kelley's IDEO, the premier product design and innovation consulting firm; the late Harry Quadracci's Quad/Graphics; Dennis Littky's exciting The Met/Big Picture schools; Maxine Clark's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Build-A-Bear; Rick Semmler's seriously cool Brazilian powerhouse, Semco; Derby CT's Griffin Hospital (home of the fantastic, patient-centric Planetree Alliance); and every damn one of the firms featured in Bo Burlingham's Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big.
Yup, these are my stars, home to many of the best leaders I've met in business, unsung engines of German and American economic prowess—and noticeably, to me, AWOL from the likes of the BizWeek and Fortune "bests" lists.
Publisher Rich Karlgaard took me over the top on this in his "Digital Rules" commentary in the current issue of Forbes (October 1). He beats up Michigan ("Tackling the Michigan Problem" is his title) and praises to the sky the likes of Minnesota and Washington. Consider Spokane:
"Spokane, like Minneapolis-St Paul, refuses to bet the economy on one or two industries. Rather, it practices what one city booster calls "Ichironomics. Like the Seattle Mariners' center fielder, Ichiro Suzuki, we try to hit singles and doubles. We want to improve the overall conditions for small businesses, not chase the large employer."
"Ichironomics"—love it. Wonder how you translate that into German?
(NB: Mr Suzuki has 227 base hits, and he's batting a stratospheric .351, going into the last week of MLB's regular season—in 2004 he broke the all-time record for hits in a single season, with a staggering 262.)
(Above: bougainvillea, blooming right outside my hotel—what's not to love about my spiritual home, California?)
TrackBack (0) | Posted by Tom Peters | Comments?Jobster.com: Latest jobs matching: consulting September 24th, 2007
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Description Performs and exhibits sound judgements and technical skills for NAI in nursing treatments and procedures as assigned. Insures comfort and safety of patient at all times, observing and reporting to nurse pertinent observations about patientom@tompeters.com September 22nd, 2007
I'm not going. Nonetheless ...
"They say" that I help them because I condone-certify-applaud their excesses in pursuit of ... innovation, a business start-up, etc. Thank you! I say that the late sports super-agent, Mark McCormack (once voted the most powerful man in sports), condoned and certified me in one of my excessive habits.
McCormack said there are times, and not necessarily that infrequently, when it is wise to travel 5,000 miles for a 5-minute meeting. It was a tactic I started using instinctively years ago, when I was working in Washington, in 1974, on drug abuse issues; the fact that I could say, "Look, I was with Ambassador Moynihan in Delhi just three days ago and he assured me that ..." was, well, a show-stopper. Without fail! (And worth a 25,000-mile roundtrip in 96 hours.)
I'm not going, this time, as I said at the top of this post. Because a tough situation mostly cleared itself up, or at least went sub-critical. But I changed my plans just yesterday, so that I'd arrive in L.A. from Sydney, doubtless exhausted after 14 hours in the air, at 10 a.m., then take off from LAX two hours later for a 1,500 mile one-way trip, be at my destination about 6 hours, then head back to L.A. and immediately go on to Las Vegas for a difficult speech.
But the point here is that I did not hesitate (and it wasn't a critically ill family member or some such personal crisis), and it's something I end up doing at least a couple of times a year. And the power is, as in the D.C. example, literally beyond measure—and almost without fail. Some part is substance, but it's overwhelmingly psychological. The fact that someone would make an "insane effort" (e.g., travel, exhausted, thousands of miles for a 25-minute audience with whomever) almost always breaks a logjam, and sometimes leads to a solution on the spot.
(Incidentally, this timeless tool is arguably more important than ever—in this age of electronic communication, the personal touch has become more valuable because of its rarity.)
TrackBack (0) | Posted by Tom Peters | Comments?tom@tompeters.com September 22nd, 2007
Make a Public "Insane Effort" Upon Occasion;
Consider It to Be an "Extreme Weapon" in your Success Arsenal
When an issue is of the utmost importance and at a standstill or in freefall, proactively look for an opportunity to "make a statement" through a gesture that indicates great pain and engagement and urgency on your part. Often, this comes in the form of "5,000 miles for a 5-minute audience" with a key participant.
(Is this Machiavellian? Sure, to some extent—but the fact is that you actually must care to do this. The "insane gesture" simply acts as proof that you'll go to any length to make progress.)
tom@tompeters.com September 22nd, 2007
I love Sydney. I ended my stay with a 2-hour powerwalk in one of my favorite venues anywhere in the world—the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain. Above you'll see one of the gardens' century plants in bloom—they can grow several feet in a day when they explode from their dormancy. (I thought one was an intruder years ago, when it appeared instantly outside the window of my San Francisco house.) Below "the mother of all trees."
tom@tompeters.com September 22nd, 2007
I found at a bookstore here Flip: How Counterintuitive Thinking Is Changing Everything—from branding and strategy to technology. On the front cover was an endorsing quote from one Warren Hart. It read like this: "EDWARD DE BONO MEETS TOM PETERS ... ESSENTIAL READING."
My question (and I eagerly await your answers) is: What the hell does that mean?
(FYI, neither De Bono's name nor mine is in the Index.)
(FYI, the book looks pretty good—I shall at least skim.)
SmartBiz RSS FEED September 21st, 2007
You've worked hard to get your business found online, what what about *you*? For many small businesses, the owner/founder is the business. So make sure you can be found online.tom@tompeters.com September 21st, 2007
I never expected to be blogging Alan Greenspan's autobiography, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. (I never expected to read it, frankly.) But I am thoroughly enjoying it—and for me it's actually a page-turner. The book is divided in two—the personal bit, and essays on basic principles of Capitalism, a global world that is mostly beyond the control of the Fed, and the like.
Most of the press has featured Greenspan's less than complimentary views of the Bush White House. That may well be, but not only is that not the page-turner part for me, but I am simply skipping it.
The surprise and delight are that the book is wonderfully written and hence moves along with style most unusual in autobiographies. But my true interest is the more general parts; that is, how Greenspan came to acquire his free market views (Ayn Rand was an important influence), and then the details of his deeply held beliefs about Capitalism and the like.
For me, this is a superb book—and it will be my companion on tomorrow's loooooong flight from Sydney to LAX. It beat out another book worthy of superlatives—Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton. The Hamilton biography is, yes, another page-turner; the drama (exactly the right word) surrounding Hamilton's establishment of the economic order that is in many ways with us today is as tense as any thriller—in fact, it is the ultimate thriller. It is also perfect to accompany Greenspan—their views are very much in accord.
TrackBack (0) | Posted by Tom Peters | Comments?tom@tompeters.com September 21st, 2007
The Financial Times (09.18) had an article on Hank Paulson; in the newspaper the accompanying picture is Paulson with France's economy minister, Christine Lagarde. I had the oddest sensation. I realized how content I was to have Secretary Paulson running our economic policy. I rarely (never?) get that sensation when reading the declarations of a public figure. To the extent that anyone can keep a steady hand on the economic tiller, I think Paulson is the pick of the litter. (I felt the same way about Robert Rubin—maybe it's a Goldman Sachs thing—partially, it is indeed that.) I hardly endorse every action that comes from Wall Street, but Paulson's long track record is such, in a very tough environment that requires the utmost ballet skills, that he will deal with issues with conservatism and flair—and guide us as best as anyone can. Yup, I just felt mostly okay amidst the current volatility—courtesy Hank Paulson.
TrackBack (0) | Posted by Tom Peters | Comments?Jobster.com: Latest jobs matching: consulting September 21st, 2007
Ref#1316 SAP Package Integration Consultant Our client, a Global Solutions organization who is looking for a SAP Package Integration Consultant - (THIS is a Full time Employee position), requiring 50% or more travel - NO relocation necessary but yoSmartBiz RSS FEED September 20th, 2007
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