dk books

Q: Why this book? Why now?

A: Two principle factors. First, like many millions of others, I was shaken by the events of 9/11 and what they portended. My concerns, moreover, also reached to the core of my professional life. After all, as a lifelong student of management, my shtick is organizational arrangements. And on 9/11, behind the human tragedy, our organizational arrangements--for example, in the arena now called "homeland security"--were found woefully inadequate. The bad guys, for one thing, used the Internet effectively. The good guys didn't. So I felt a renewed sense of urgency to re-think the way we organize to get work done in general, and the work of the public security sector in particular.

Second, I have watched with great alarm the aftermath of the 2001 recession. As we all know, it's been a jobless "recovery." The reason for this, which I began to discuss a half dozen years ago, is the enormous productivity boost finally coming out of the new technologies--which not only directly replace workers, but also make it far easier to ship valuable white-collar jobs offshore. Yesterday's trickle of jobs lost will obviously be tomorrow's flood. In this case, a red tide of white-collar professional blood.

Those two factors--one dealing with security concerns, the other with commercial and career concerns--motivated me to blow the cobwebs from my keyboard, and get going.

Q: Why is the book titled "Re-imagine"?

A: One of the book's two epigraphs comes from the just-retired Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General Eric Shinseki: "If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less." Put simply, it's a time to re-imagine positively everything. Our domestic security. Our war fighting. (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is leading nothing less than a revolution at the Pentagon.) Our commercial arrangements. (Look at the power expressed by Wal*Mart and Dell, courtesy the new technologies and new organizational approaches. Note: new ways of organizing, not clever new B. School strategies.)

We need, then, new business models, new methods for war fighting, new ideas about the progressions of careers in the absence of employment security, and, perhaps the apex of it all, brand new approaches to education in an age where value is based on intellectual capital and creativity, not the height and girth of one's smokestacks. Added up, it's a time for wholesale re-imaginings. In fact, on the back cover of my book, I call such re-imaginings the "foremost task and responsibility" of this generation. I am dead serious.

Q: Presumably, you do not think the Internet was a fad, or that the dot-com crash signalled the decline of technological frenzy?

A: I'll say! Like Intel Chairman Andy Grove, I think we're pretty much at the beginning of the beginning. The dot-com crash was real. Bubble and burst bubble, the madness of crowds and all that. But from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq to Wal*Mart, Dell and Amazon's "supply chains," we're beginning to catch glimpses of the power of the new information technology's reach. Talk about shock and awe! The fundamentals of how humans communicate and work will be wholly upended in the next five to 25 years. Hey, all you have to do these days is look at how the kids have brought the movie and recording industries to their knees. Napster may be on hold, and Hollywood's principle strategy may be filing lawsuits against teenagers--but the genie is out of the bottle.

And of course I haven't even touched on the biosciences revolution which, over a slightly more extended timeframe, may well make the info-revolution look puny by comparison. Added up, and it's going to be a hell of a ride for, say, the next 50 years. Technological frenzy past? Need for a new economy passé? You've got to be kidding!

Q: You mentioned Hollywood lawsuits. Industries are hunkering down and consolidating. Is it to be a battle of the Titans? Is the '80s and '90s wave of entrepreneurship but a distant memory?

A: No! It is an age of disruption! No one/institution is safe! In the last 30 years, we've watched GM, IBM, AT&T, U.S. Steel, Sears et al. take their lumps, to put it mildly. Does any sane person think that Microsoft and Wal*Mart are invulnerable? Probably the same "sane" persons who thought GM and AT&T and IBM and Sears were invulnerable a scant quarter century ago!

I confidently expect wave after wave after wave of entrepreneurs to wreak havoc on any industry you can name for the foreseeable future. Incidentally consolidations historically have typically been the last gasp of the terminally-non innovative. No difference today, as far as I can tell.

Q: Why have you chosen Dorling Kindersley to publish your latest book?

A: My decision to shift publishers ties neatly into what I've just been saying. It is an epoch of perpetual disruption. Vivid responses to vivid problems are called for. I've never seen business as dry and dreary, as an abstraction. (That was the whole point of In Search of Excellence, right?) My goal has long been to repaint conceptions of business in Technicolor. Now, as the pace of change accelerates, the need for spirit and bravura and Technicolor approaches to everything from your and my career to Mr. Rumsfeld's war making, I felt the business book per se ought to enter the 21st century with a bang. It ought to exude the energy and passion and excitement (and madness) of the times. And that's precisely what Dorling Kindersley, almost alone, has long been doing in publishing.

Frankly, this is a marriage made in heaven, a "management guru" whose signature is passionate views mates with a publisher who has breathed vigour into the presentation of books. I must say that producing this book was the greatest thing that's happened to me since In Search of Excellence.

Q: Speaking of your passions, you alone among the "guru set" seem fixated by the idea of the power of women and the power of design. Why?

A: Because, to paraphrase the immortal bank robber Willie Sutton, it's where the money is!

Let's start with women. I was led to this party seven years ago by the woman who was president of my training company. She insisted that it was high time I got educated. She gathered about 30 of America's leading women entrepreneurs and they spent a cathartic day reading me the riot act about the way women are ignored in the marketplace by any industry you can name, from hospitality to financial services. I pondered. I wandered. I listened. I took notes. I gathered data. And in short order I was shouting, "Holy smoke. How did we [we male gurus!?] miss all this?" Women account for over half of America's GDP. Women own ten million businesses in the United States. Yet the still male-dominated business structures and hierarchies (just 7 of 500 Fortune 500 CEOs are female) are hopelessly out of it. As to why I'm the only one of my kind ranting about this obvious multi-trillion-dollar-opportunity-gone-wanting, I don't have a clue.

Not so incidentally, as I dug into the whys and wherefores of businesses' non responsiveness to women-as-purchasers, I delved even more deeply into basic business structures. And it became alarmingly clear that (1) those structures are thoroughly out of touch with the new world economic order and (2) that women as would-be leaders bring exactly the right, new skill set to the party. Hence the second of my two chapters in the book on women is titled, "Meet the New Boss: Women Rule."

My design passion came out of the same brewing kettle, more or less. The basic notion of the business "value proposition" is changing dramatically. And rapidly. We took a hit from efficient Japanese manufacturers in the 1980s, and learned our lesson--quickly. We adopted the quality thing and the continuous improvement thing--with vigor. But welcome to 2003! Excellent quality and business efficiencies are pervasive--from Mexico and China (and the U.S.), as well as from Japan and Germany. (Not so incidentally, those two mega-threats from the 1980s are mired in intractable economic slumps. Their quality record is still tops. Their innovation record is problematic.)

So what's next on the value-added horizon? I devote about a third of the book, chapters 5 through 12, to answering that question. But at the heart of the heart of the matter is design. Not "cool looking stuff," though that's part of it, but a generic approach to enterprise that honors creativity and innovation and the concoction of extraordinary customer experiences. What if every business "transaction" was like the "experience" of Cirque du Soleil? Well, I think that to survive, such is more or less going to be the story across the board. Enterprise offerings must center upon the provision of scintillating experiences. (E.g., IBM has become one giant consultancy, peddling change-the-world solutions, not hardware-with-good-service. UPS wants us to "get over the truck," and think about what "Brown can do for us.") Business processes must "sing." Training courses must "sing." In short, as the new technologies and new competitors engulf us as individuals and enterprises, we must scramble up the value ladder, as our forbearers did when the farms were foreclosed and then the factories were shuttered. "Design thinking" is near the core of the answer. And, incidentally, it's another area that seems to be almost wholly ignored by the management guru set. Reason? Again: beats me.

Q: So are most individuals, from U. S. Army PFCs to mid-level bureaucrats, up to the challenge?

A: I honestly think so, which is not say the trip will be painless, not by a long shot.

As I write, I'm in the midst of reading a brilliant new biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson's view, circa 1850, of "self reliance" is my view, circa 2000, of Brand You. Brand You is not about ego-centrism, at least in a pernicious way. It's about recognition. Recognizing that lifetime employment is dead. Perhaps recognizing that lifetime white-collar employment wasn't that great a ride to begin with. (Think Dilbert. Think cubicle slavery.) It's about recognizing that there is no alternative except to grab the reins of one's career--grab the reins out of the hands of an inconstant employer! We may indeed stay with that employer, but no longer with a naïve belief about the perpetuity of our "employment contract." The new me will view every perspective project through the prism, in part, of how it can add directly to my "portfolio of marketable skills"--should the other shoe drop or the plug be pulled.

One comforting thing about all this is that it's quintessentially American. Our National Character oozes the urge to re-invent. From the Pilgrim fathers and Ben Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Tony Robbins we've been exhorted to "Go West," take charge of our lives, re-invent ourselves. Frightening? Of course! Exhilarating and liberating? Absolutely! (Hey, just ask a woman! Women--recall my earlier statistic--are starting businesses at a per capita rate that wildly outpaces men!)

Q: Any final words you'd like to say?

A: I hope "readers" look at this book. Sniff it. Feel it. The goal is to reflect the wild energy that is enterprise at its best. At its best, business is about creativity, service, growth, talent development--and, yes, profits that allow you to invest in more wild adventures with more top talent.

But the bottom line is clear: We cannot turn back the clock. New enemies in new guises are here to stay. New technology is here to stay. New competitors are here to stay. My hope is that we can get beyond "coping"--and learn to thrive amidst the volatility of the wild and wooly, horrible and wonderful years to come.

Tom Peters/West Tinmouth VT/09.10.2003

BACK TO TOP