Passion for Excellence (by Tom Peters)

Passion for Excellence (by Tom Peters)

Common Sense
- A Blinding Flash of the Obvious
- MBWA: The Technology of the Obvious
- Integrity and the Technology of the Obvious
Customers
- Common Courtesy: The Ultimate Barrier to Competitor Entry
- No Such Thing as a Commodity
- "Mere Perception": On the Irreducible Humanness of Customers
- Quality Is Not a Technique
- The "Smell" of the Customer
- Good reading sources
Innovation
- The Mythology of Innovation, or a Skunkworks Tale
- Three Skunks
- The Context of Innovation
- The "Smell" of Innovation
- Good reading sources
People
- Bone-Deep Beliefs
- Ownership!
- Applause Applause
- Good reading sources
Leadership
- Attention, Symbols, Drama, Vision—and Love
- Transformations and Enhancements
- Coaching
- Doing MBWA
- Excellence in School Leadership: Initial Speculations
- What Price Excellence?
- Good reading sources
Afterword 1986: Accelerating the Pace of Change
- Introduction
  - Change as the Only Constant
  - The Fortune 500 Responds
  - Winners Everywhere
  - Fighting City Hall
- Assessing the Model
  Passion takes the orginal eight points from Search, reduces them to three (people,customers, and innovation), and then adds a fourth (leadership) This section presents substantial alterations to the content of Passion since it was first published.
  - Customers
    - Increased emphasis
      - Listening
      - Measurement of Customer Satisfaction
      - Niche-aimed Strategies
    - Additions
      - Management of Distribution Channels
      - International Market Development
      - "Total Customer Responsiveness"
      - "Manufacturing as a Key Marketing Weapon"
  - Innovation
    - Increased emphasis
      - The Role of Teams
      - "Big Ends from Small Beginnings"
      - Modeling Innovation/Purposeful Impatience
    - Additions
  - People
    - Increased emphasis
      - Structural Attributes of Psychological Ownership
      - The Ten-to Thirty-person Team
      - "Charts and Boxes" Organization Structure Issues
    - Additions
      - Tailored Monetary Incentives
  - Leadership
    - Increased emphasis
    - Additions
      - "What Have You Changed?"
- The Promises
  - Customers
    - Value-added features into every product or service/differentiators
    - Customer-satisfaction measures (they buy intangibles)
    - Live quality in your every action
    - Listen to your customers
    - Tailor every product or service offering sold internationally
    - Continuous "overkill" customer service training
    - Consider radical "overinvestment" in your direct sales/service force
    - Mount joint company/outsider problem-solving teams
    - Make manufacturing (operations) a primary marketing tool.
    - Everybody can state your strategic distinction in 25 words or less. Test
  - Innovation
    - Quantitative Objectives
    - Sizable enough portfolio of small beginnings to ensure a constant flow of new products
    - Turn it in to a fast pilot. Cut development time
    - Staff new development teams with full time/permanent people
    - Become an executive champion.
    - Actively reward defiance of your own inhibiting regulations.
      - Find and batter down directly irritationg obstacles
    - Actively and publicly reward mistakes/failures—good tries
    - Daily identify with innovation and change. Let people know where you stand.
    - Create an Innovators Hall of Fame
    - Organize New Product/Service around extensive "word of mouth" campaigns
  - People
    - Regularly celebrate small wins.
    - Include all your people in some substantial gain sharing program. Team results.
    - Use teams as a basic organization building block.
    - Involve all people in quality improvement programs.
    - Institue measurement systems that are clear, simple, credible.
    - Reduce layer of managmeny to no more than five.
    - Assign your support staff people to work in the field rather than corporate.
    - Debureaucratize-paperwork and unnecessary procedures
    - Dehumiliate.
  - Leadership
    - Daily calendar should reflect only the top priorities
    - Consciously live your vision, values, and priorities
      - Meetings
      - Visits
      - In the minutiae of your daily routine
    - Achieve operating people dominance.
    - Promote on the basis of their ability to create excitement among there colleagues.
    - In times of change, devote major time (50%) to the new strategic priority.
      - Develop a new class of hero
    - Unfailingly use promotion to signal the new strategic direction
    - Develop and use a 5 minute "stump speech".
    - Substitute pilots for proposals. Test it
    - Formal evaluation of leaders—what have you changed lately?
- Reprise
  - Change is the only constant
  - A Change in Attitude
  - A change in the way we spend our time
The World Turned Upside Down: The shape of the New American Competitor
- Manufacturing
  - Manufacturing—the "old way"
    - Volume, scale economics, tonnage mentality, capacity thinking
    - Capital & automation more important than people.
    - Volume, low cost, and efficiency more important than:
      - Quality
      - Responsiveness
    - Industrial engineers, in ivory towers, call the shots.
  - Manufacturing—the "new way"
    - "Focused factory," short production runs, fast changeovers (flexibility)
    - Engineers live in the plant.
    - Fewer line managers, more on-site process engineers.
    - People more important than capital.
    - Quality and responsiveness are king.
    - Manufacturing as a primary marketing tool.
    - Joint problem solving with customers.
      - Customers to the plant
      - Plant teams to the customer
    - Plant managers and line people in general are heros.
      - Industrial engineers are "on call" to support them.
    - Plants clean, offices cramped; not vice versa.
    - Manufacturers as "business team" members, not just functional specialists.
    - Suppliers a major part of the team; joint problem solving with suppliers.
- Marketing
  - Marketing—the "old way"
    - Mass
      - Mass markets, mass advertising (for branding purposes)
      - Mass Data analysis
      - Lengthy market tests
    - Violent competition over tiny fractions of a percent of market share.
    - Functional integrity of the marketing department.
      - Analysis over intuition
      - Marketers in their offices.
    - Consideration of large projects only
      - Massive line extensions
      - Major new products
  - Marketing—the "new way"
    - Fragmented markets, new uses.
    - New market creation (rather than market sharing) is primary.
    - Quick and dirty data collection, rapid and small-scale market tests.
    - Widespread use of marketing teams (multifuction)
    - Marketers in the field 50% of the time
    - Innovations via customers
    - Market leader listening and joint product development with customers
    - Battering down functional barriers.
    - Heightened awareness of service (and reliability/quality) component.
    - High-value-added, niche, and segmentation focus.
    - Speed, speed, speed
- Sales and Service
  - Sales and Service—the "old way"
    - "Move the product"
      - Volume is king (with franchisees and distributors, too)
      - "More" is winning formula
      - Quality is secondary
    - Relationships and transaction profitability take second place to volume.
    - Sales function denigrated, service even more so.
    - Product ideas from marketing, merchandising and engineering, not sales.
    - Service as mechanics, not primary source of customer listening.
    - Service as routine task accomplishers, not primary marketing arm.
  - Sales and Service—the "new way"
    - Sales and service teams as heros (plus their ancillary supporters)
      - dispatchers
      - reservation centers
      - distribution centers
    - Execution beats brilliance.
    - Overkill spending
      - on sales and service training and support tools.
      - on channel management in general.
    - Relationship and profitability beats volume.
    - Sales and service prime source of inputs to new product and new service development.
    - Sales (relationship management) and service activities seen as a if not the, primary source for value added/differentiation over the long haul.
- International
  - International—the "old way"
    - An Adjunct activity.
    - Way to move past-peak U.S.-designed and manufactured products.
    - "We" develop (onshore) "they" use.
    - "Global brands" managed by U.S. headquarters marketers.
  - International—the "new way"
    - Primary activity.
    - Focus on new market creation, not just lagging follow-up use of U.S. products
    - As many trends/products/services start "there" and move to "here" as vice versa.
    - Extensive offshore product development, tailoring of all products.
    - Mandatory overseas tours of all aspirants to the throne.
    - All learn language before moving.
    - Start small, earn your way in, and grow, rather than volume extension of only our onshore best.
- Innovation
  - Innovation—the "old way"
    - Central (or group) R&D as driver, big projects as the norm.
    - Big companies should (can) only sensibly look at big projects.
    - Technology/science driven, not market/customer driven.
    - Cleverness of design (in new products) more important than
      - reliability
      - maintainability
      - serviceability
    - Innovation limited to new products and services in seperate component of the organization
  - Innovation—the "new way"
    - All activities hodbeds for innovation not just new products or services
      - Manufacturing,
      - MIS
      - Accounting
      - Personnel
    - Big ends from small beginnings—must have a sizable portfolio of small starts.
    - Tiny acquisitions (in new areas), even for giant companies.
    - Flatter, more responsive organizations.
    - Manufacturing flexibility as key innovation-spurring tool
    - All functions to the field, with customers.
    - Product development cycles cut by 90% or more as the norm!
    - Every customer is a segment.
    - Innovation with key customers/suppliers.
    - Multifunction teams as opportunity creators.
    - Skunkworks, divisional product development, encouragement of champions
      - at least as important as/more important than centralized R&D.
    - Trust intuition, quick and dirty tests.
    - Speed, speed, speed!
- People
  - People—the "old way"
    - Capital more important than people.
    - Scale economics win.
    - No way you can beat the turnover problem, so exessive training is a waste.
    - Unions are the dragging force.
    - People need tight controls, close supervision.
    - Money is the only motivator.
    - Employee share ownership only works when stock prices are rising.
  - People—the "new way"
    - Quality, service, and responsiveness—through people more than through capital.
    - Participation programs, individual and team.
    - Lower supervisor to nonsupervisor ratios (1 to 100 vs 1 to 10)
    - and/or elimination of one or more levels of supervision.
    - People involvement in all plant activities.
      - Budgeting
      - Inventory management
      - Layout and design
      - Day to day problem solving
      - Inspection (100 percent)
    - Gain sharing/productivity-sharing programs; EmployeeShareOwnPrograms
    - "Upskilling"; extensive training.
    - Creation of "execution heros" (doers) down the line.
- Organization
  - Organization—the "old way"
    - Hierarchial, staff centered.
    - Officially "matrixed" to "solve" coordination needs.
    - Spans of control of 1 to 10 at the lowest level the norm.
  - Organization—the "new way"
    - Flat! Large Span (1 to 100 at the bottom, 1 to 20 at the top)
    - Elimination of first-line supervisors and grou executives alike.
    - Pruning 80 percent fo middle management and layers.
    - Line dominated.
    - One or more "lowest" levels of supervision replaced by "coordinators"
      - elected or appointed
    - "Business team"/task team/small group focus.
    - Decentralized business units.
    - Limited facility size (100-250)
    - Value driven rather than paper controls driven.
    - Strategy making bottom up, decentralized.
    - High unit-leader spending authority.
    - Extremely high share of all functional staff people in operations
      - Functions
        
        Finance
        Accounting
        MIS personnel
      - Operating units
        
        Factories
        Operations areas
        Sales branches
        —not at division or group or corporate center.
    - No group executive level.
- MIS
  - MIS—the "old way"
    - Centralized information control
    - Central MIS fiefdom as information hoaders for the sake of "consistency"
  - MIS—the "new way"
    - Decentralized data processing
      - connected by local area networks
      - with access to all other data banks.
    - Plus encouragement of personal computer proliferation.
    - Some data base integritty, but multiple databases permitted.
    - Central MIS as staff advisers for the strategic use of information
      - Direct customer
      - supplier
      - company linkage.
- Financial Management and Control
  - Financial Management and Control—the "old way"
    - Centralized.
    - Staff as reviewer of all proposals, formulator of extensive guidance
    - Staff as cop
  - Financial Management and Control—the "new way"
    - Decentralized
    - Almost all finance people in the field
      - Except for
        
        Few corporate cash managers
        and a tiny audit staff
    - Finance staffers as members of
      - entrepreneurial business teams and
      - intrapreneurial skunkworks
      - (below the division/SBU level)
    - High spending authority at facility/business unit level.
- Leadership
  - Leadership—the "old way"
    - Detached, analytic
    - Centralized strategic planning
    - Dominated by central corporate and group executive staffs.
  - Leadership—the "new way"
    - Decentralized.
    - Values set from the top, strategic development from below
    - All staff functions radically decentralized
      - Planning
      - Purchasing
      - Finance
      - MIS
      - Personnel
    - Value driven
    - Top executive and lean staff in touch with customers and operations
    - Leader as a dramatist tone setter/ visonay

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic”. — Peter Drucker

The shift from manual workers who do as they are being told — either by the task or by the boss — to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves ↓ profoundly challenges social structure …

“Managing Oneself is a REVOLUTION in human affairs.” … “It also requires an almost 180-degree change in the knowledge workers’ thoughts and actions from what most of us—even of the younger generation—still take for granted as the way to think and the way to act.” …

… “Managing Oneself is based on the very opposite realities: Workers are likely to outlive organizations (and therefore, employers can’t be depended on for designing your life), and the knowledge worker has mobility.” ← in a context

These pages are attention directing tools for navigating a world moving toward unimagined futures.

It’s up to you to figure out what to harvest and calendarize
— working something out in time (1915, 1940, 1970 … 2040 … the outer limit of your concern) — nobody is going to do it for you.

It may be a step forward to actively reject something (rather than just passively ignoring) and then figure out a coping plan for what you’ve rejected.

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