Peters - The big little things: 167 ways to pursue excellence

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Title Page

On July 28, 2004, I made my first blog post at tompeters.com. The topic was then Illinois state senator Barack Obamas speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston. In an apolitical post, I said that it had been one helluva speechtake it from someone who knows a good speech when he hears one. (Me.) Since then Ive made over 1,700 posts, and with the help of many friends the blog has prosperedeven bagging a Top 500 designation in 2007!

On September 18, six weeks after beginning my blogging adventure, I happened by a particularly messy chain-store branch in the Natick Mall outside of Boston. I followed the visit with a spur-of-the-moment, throwaway post that I called 100 Ways to Succeed/Make Money #1: THE CLEAN & NEAT TEAM! (TEAM TIDY?); I suggested that the stores blatant disarray screamed

We dont care.

I said that stores, and even accounting offices, were judged as much or more on appearance as on substance. The appearance is a nontrivial part of the overall assessment of the substancein fact, a part of the substance.

I promised that Id proceed to supply 100 such success tipsGod alone knows why!

I enjoyed the process, and by July 2009 wed posted precisely 176 of the promised 100! Somewhere along the way, Bob Miller, first boss of the publisher Hyperion, and currently launching HarperStudio, ran (surfed) across the tips, got in touch with us, and said, in effect, Youve inadvertently written a book. He sent along a contractand we signed, despite my prior vow, recorded in blood, that Id never write another book. But, hey, why not, a few books sold, a little publicityand no work!

Ha!

I have a very low dissatisfaction threshold, and dont think a book is a book until its been through about a dozen major redraftsand this one has been no exception. I more or less sacrificed the full summer of 2009 on my glorious farm in Vermont to editing and editing and editingand youll see the product here. (For better or for worse.)

All of which is to say that in some respects this is not a normal bookor I guess it probably is, circa 2010. That is, it is derived from a blogeven if now the original is barely recognizable. Among other things, that means that the structure does not follow a tidy plotline. We have organized stuff in appropriate pots, but what you see is what you get. Its a book of tips or notions or suggestions or actionable ideas, more or less as they arrived at tompeters.com. They were based on observations that flowed from my travels (mainly international these days), the news of the day, exchanges with some of the tens of thousands of people whove attended my seminars, from Bucharest to Shanghai to Tallinn, and things large and mostly small that have pissed me off along the way. (I argue here and elsewhere that the only effective source of innovation is pissed-off people! Hence, bite your tongue and cherish such misfits! I, in fact, have been toleratedor notalong the way. Cf. McKinsey and Me, 19741981; McKinsey and Me Part Company, circa 1981.)

Not many of these more or less tips are oceanic. That is, they are mostly, as the books title suggests little BIG things. Little BIG things such as my reaction to the messy storeor, alternatively, a spectacularly clean bathroom, complete with several decades of family photos, at the Wagon Wheel Country Drive-in restaurant in Gill, Massachusetts. They are littlea mere restroom at a smallish restaurant in a wee town youve doubtless never heard of. (Applicability in Tallinn?) But they are also, indeed, BIGincluding in Tallinn. That is, the restaurants We care so much we can taste it or the chain stores We dont care, We cant be bothered is at the heart of the BIG idea of so-called experience marketingwhich in turn is the heart of value-added in a crowded marketplace for damn near everything damn near everywhere that insists on such value-added for survival.

In general, I am a sucker for a little, comprehensible, compelling nugget of a life experience that is representative of a BIG and Potent Idea; I prefer such an illustration to some elaborate example in a pithy tome from the Harvard Business School Presscomplete with charts and graphs! (I suppose this predilection means Ive traveled a long way from my engineering training, my MBA, and that McKinsey stintin all of which complex analysis rules; something that you can understand is considered a less-than-powerful strategic insight. WhoopsI think I just inadvertently explained the super-super-senior-derivates-that-defied-comprehension problem that brought you and me and the global economy to our collective knees.) But I am, in my passion for little stories with real people as the principal players, being consistent with my approach and fervent and guiding belief about effective enterprises first exhibited in public in 1982 in a book I cowrote with Bob Waterman called In Search of Excellence.

The main takeaway from that book, as I still see it almost three decades later, was a simple (little BIG thing) assertion that was our de facto six-word motto:

Hard is soft. Soft is hard.

Search was to a significant extent a response to the Japanese challenging American economic hegemony and beating the hell out of us in the auto market in the 1970s, based not on a sophisticated analysis of the U.S. market concocted by a brigade of MBAs, but on offering up cars that worked. (Better quality.) So Bob and I slapped the regnant strategy-first mavens in the face and said that the hard numbers were the true soft stuffencompassing a ridiculously limited slice of reality. And such purportedly soft things as quality, people and relationships, core values, closeness to the customer, and, thank you Hewlett-Packard, Managing By Wandering Around, or MBWA, were the true hard stuffthese aspects of business were not fluff-soft, as disdainfully portrayed by the likes of McKinsey and the B-schools, including mighty Stanford, from which both Bob and I had graduated with an MBA. (We were also both engineers and both McKinsey partners.)

We tried our bestto, alas, I must ruefully admit, little avail.

The Enron fiasco, crafted by Harvard B-School- and McKinseytrained Jeff Skilling, was a classic case, circa 2001, of the lingering reality of numbers over good sense. And, God knows, the mega-crash of 2007++ was led by phony-soft numbers and delusional advanced math and a total lack of good sense.

Well, this book is another effort to right the ship!

In fact, an inbred and determined back-to-basics streak has engulfed me in the last couple or so years. In part, its in reaction to the entirely preventable financial madness that surrounds us, but its also, perhaps, a result of a modest pushback against the hyper-hyped-over-the-top-breathlessly-breathless absolutely everything we know about everything has changed air surrounding the likes of Google, iPhones, Facebook, and Twitter.

I do blog, and blog assiduously; hence, this book. And I do in fact tweet and enjoy it and find it powerful and useful as well as pleasurableso I hardly merit a Luddite badge.

But still