Tom Peters
Tom Peters is the author of In Search of Excellence (and more than a dozen other bestsellers), and one of the business world’s leading provocateurs. Peters is also the Chairman of the Tom Peters Company, a global training and consulting organization. In his latest book, The Little BIG Things, Peters sums up 163 of his best lessons on pursuing excellence.
We caught up with Peters to ask him how he would choose a consultant to work with, how consulting firms should differentiate themselves, and why it’s important for people to think about their legacies sooner rather than later.
McLaughlin: If you wanted to bring in an outsider to help you, what would you look for—beyond the basic qualifications to do the work?
Peters: I would have to give the old standby answer: some measure of character and integrity, which I’d look for long before I’d consider the person’s qualifications. I’d try to get a handle on those soft factors with some measure of intuition, supported by facts, of what kind of a person I was dealing with.
McLaughlin: When you look at how smaller professional service firms approach the market, do you think many of them just try to imitate their big brothers?
Peters: Yes, and that makes about as much sense as a small retail store trying to copy Wal-Mart. When Wal-Mart started growing, they could take over a town and shut down all the competition on Main Street. Jim and Jenny Jones, who were running a 3,000 square foot retail operation, would try to turn themselves into a mini Wal-Mart, and they got killed.
My ex-wife came from a small town in Missouri and, when Wal-Mart came in, a lot of family friends went out of business. I was sympathetic, but my professional judgment was that, alas, most of them deserved it–for precisely the reason that you’re talking about.
McLaughlin: Whether you’re a small firm or a large one, how do you differentiate yourself in this me-too world?
Peters: You’ve got to be phenomenally good at what you do. You can have a special talent and convey that to the market, or a not-so-special talent but incredible execution skills.
You might be the most boring person on earth, but when you work on, say, an inventory problem for a company with 75 employees, you work 18 hours a day and you get the job done with dispatch and as few screw-ups as possible. Maybe you’d like your business to become the Wal-Mart or Apple of your particular service area, but that’s not likely.
How many people have put their life savings on the line to start a 12-table restaurant even though they weren’t that good a chef or a savvy business person? When the business goes bust, you say well, I’m an entrepreneur and that happens. But the truth is you really didn’t have anything very special to sell.
Particularly if you are starting a small consultancy, you’d better think twice before you bet your life on it. If the venture fails, maybe you can chalk it up as good experience and go back to work for a big company. But, as I said, there are a lot of people who shouldn’t do it in the first place.
For those of us who are mortal, focusing on the basics of execution and client relationships is the alpha through omega of differentiation.
McLaughlin: Some of the service firms appear to be focusing more on designing a client experience instead of just rolling in with a work plan and executing it.
Peters: Right. But my experience is that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. When I had a training company, if we gave them the cookie cutter, we got in trouble for not customizing. When we customized, we lost money because it took so long.
We wanted to be thorough when we customized so we did eight jillion client interviews, and didn’t really charge the client for them. We ended up with the perfect product. But unless we had sold and made copies of it, we were going to go broke.
You could make the foot-in-the-door argument: I’m going to customize like the dickens for this small division of American Express; I’m going to get a great reputation and the project will spread to 27 divisions. Maybe, but do that too much, and you end up paying the customization bill. You’re in the red at the end of the quarter or, worse still, at the end of the year.
I’m all in favor of customization but, particularly if you’re running a small firm, you’d better focus on the cost side of that equation or your business will fail.
McLaughlin: What about this concept of thinking about legacies?
Peters: Well, thinking about legacy is not figuring out what my grand design is and how I’m going to get there; I think that you discover your grand design along the way–or it discovers you. And I don’t think you need to start with the notion that you’re trying to get into the consultants’ hall of fame.
One has to be careful with generalizations because there are lots of people who don’t want to work 15 hours a day, 6 days a week. But, if you do work that hard and make it into the consultants’ hall of fame, you may have had a trip to the divorce court along the way, or missed most of your daughter’s La Crosse games. Legacy comes at a price, and anybody who says it doesn’t is a complete idiot in denial.
Legacy isn’t just about what you will have to look back on at the age of 65. I’m more than willing to say legacy could have a two-year horizon. If nothing from the start is memorable about what you are doing, I think you’re in trouble in terms of your organization’s growth. But that’s a personal bias as much as it is a professional observation.
McLaughlin: You’ve made many contributions and have accomplished a lot in your career. What inspires you and gets you jumping out of bed every morning?
Peters: One of my grand theories is that, fundamentally, there’s only one source of innovation, and that’s pissed off people. Maybe you’re a curious, energetic 26-year old working in the purchasing department of a $40 million company. You’re not Einstein, but smart enough to see that the way you’re doing things is really dumb.
That becomes your energizer: you attempt to become a change agent within the context of your 11-person purchasing department. And if that doesn’t get you anywhere, maybe you go get an advanced degree in purchasing science. Or you decide to take the leap and go out on your own. I think anger is the essential motivator.
McLaughlin: So what are you riled up about these days?
Peters: Right now, I’m pissed off at people in the Gulf oil spill fiasco, and not just the big companies like Halliburton and BP. It is a bunch of individuals–professional engineers working for BP who didn’t blow the whistle.
I understand extenuating circumstances, that the economy is bad, and you have three kids to support. But, as an engineer by training, I am royally pissed off at the engineers who knew deep in their hearts that this particular design was not right and did nothing.
And, as always, just like with the financial crisis, it’s quite circular. There are a million people who missed the boat. We can shout about the horrible Mining and Minerals regulatory agency or how awful BP is, but we were really let down by those who abrogated their professional responsibilities.
McLaughlin: Thanks for your time.
You can find out more about Peters at www.TomPeters.com.
You might also want to read our interview, Tom Peters: Re-Imagining Business.
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