Like him or hate him, Tom Peters is clearly the most
influential--and certainly the most visible--management consultant since
Peter Drucker. His conversation is intoxicating, his intensity almost
evangelical, yet he is utterly comfortable with the contradictions and
paradoxes in his works.
Instead of simply exhorting American businesses to stay "close to
the customer," he now feels that large corporations must not only revamp
their entire organizational structure--but set a match to it. When he
says something like "We work to fail," it's hard to take him seriously.
But he is serious. With the intensity of a sports event, he continues to
shout his ideas at us, and it is unclear whether he wants us to take him
literally, or whether he just wants to shake us up.
Owen Lipstein and James Mauro for Psychology Today: For the benefit
of those who haven't read your books, can you give us a general run-down
of your current philosophy?
Tom Peters: Okay, let me start with where it came from. I make the
comment that in In Search of Excellence and the next two books we talk,
ad nauseam perhaps, about companies getting "close to the customer." My
25-words-or-less mea culpa is that that philosophy is a bunch of bull if
you're trying to succeed in some seven- or eight-layered organization
with lots of delay in decision-making, lots of middle-management, a steep
hierarchy, etc. I'm not arguing that customers are less important these
days, just that, to some extent, we put the cart before the horse.
I have now decided that the definition of horse is creating agile
organizations, and I focus a lot more on developing structures that
eventually make getting close to the customer an automatic thing.
Absolutely no intervening bureaucracy whatsoever. Now, with the
life-expectancy of a new product going from a half-dozen years to six or
eight months, you'd better have an organization with virtually zero
impedance in a structural sense. My philosophy these days can be boiled
down to a single sentence: It's a crazy world, so you'd better have a
crazy organization.
PT: What do you say to the IBMs of the world--the companies that
are already large? Are you telling them that they should commit hara-kiri
and destroy their entire middle management?
TP: De facto? Yes. I sincerely believe that the IBMs of the world,
as structured today, don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of
surviving. IBM is beginning to believe that. One problem with large
organizations is that they are stuffy in an unstuffy world. Stuffy
organizations are terrific if you can count on the Model-T lasting 20
years. Then, who in the hell would want rapid decision-making?
I can give you modern examples of companies that took for instance
a 4,000-person headquarters and trimmed it down to 200 people. That
doesn't mean that everybody else was out on the street; a lot of people
get redistributed into moderate-size business units that are a lot closer
to the marketplace.
PT: You're talking about radical surgery, not 10-percent cuts in
work staff.
TP: Absolutely. Take for instance this so-called ".05 to 5 Rule"
which was coined by a couple of Boston Consulting Group partners and
which says that things are only happening .05 to 5 percent of the time,
and that 95 to 99.95 percent of elapsed time is waste. Acknowledging that
means the fundamental basis of the organization is wrong.
PT: It's almost like you have to take an organization chart and
draw an X across it.
TP: Yes, except that, when you sit down with your organization
chart, you don't use an eraser, you use a match. But it is true that you
almost have to go bankrupt. One of the things that intrigues me is the
work on organizational ecology, which essentially says that the
probability of organizational success is largely dependent upon the
accident of when you were founded. The thing that fascinates me is that a
lot of the difference between CNN and CBS stems from the fact that CBS is
a 70-year-old organization, and CNN was founded in June of 1980. These
other poor souls at CBS, say, are trying to adapt the computer to an
old-fashioned organization where, basically, CNN started with a blank
sheet of paper. There's a wonderful line from True Believer by Eric
Hoffer, to the extent that naivete is one of the great success
keys.
My passion is to get people to have a serious discussion about the
importance of the role of groundless courage. What I want to do is sit
down with a bunch of stuffed shirts and say, look, we're going to spend
the next six hours together and our topic is going to be groundless
courage. Kirkus Reviews called me "the Tim Leary of management gurus."
But groundless courage is not Tim Learyism; it is a phenomenally
pragmatic statement in 1993. What the hell else could you call Ted
Turner's vision?
PT: Do you realize just how threatening you are to chief executive
officers? To essentially middle management of all sorts?
TP: Yes, but the point is--which is worse? What I'm saying may be
threatening as hell, but in an environment where on the 26th of October,
1992, the chairman of General Motors gets canned, there aren't many
people who are safe anymore. So which is more of a threat?
PT: What do you think changed to bring about this threat?
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