- You spend your winters in New Zealand, why New Zealand?
- The days are longer.
My, this is, I wanna give you the real answer
but it's not fair to do so.
There is a family member who really does have
seasonal affective disorder and as I said to somebody
is proof positive that SAD is not something that
the shrinks invented to make higher fees and so short
days are painful and we had many many friends who go down
to South Carolina or Florida or something like that
but you don't gain anything in terms of the daylight.
Probably if you go to South Carolina you get 3.7 minutes
or something like that so you've gotta go deep south.
And well there's no, we love it.
We have, I'm sure you know the term, a lot of people
who are listening to us or watching us don't.
It's called Bach but Bach is B-A-C-H which is short
for Bachelor and it's little shacks on the beach.
And we literally have a 700 square foot shack 25
yards from the Tazman Sea and it's just gorgeous.
And it's a spectacular geographically spectacular
climatologically and as silly as it is to make
these kinds of people, Kiwis are nice people by and large.
I said this to somebody, a Kiwi would have no idea what
you were talking about if you uttered the phrase work life
balance, they work as hard as you and I do or anybody
else does but they understand that they go hiking on
the weekend and it wouldn't necessarily occur to them
that there's supposed to work 60/60 24/7.
They're not slackers in any way but they have a life.
And the funny part of it is, despite all the technology
that we're using here and so on, it's really still at the
end of the world and I would never wanna say anything
critical but at the end of three months, we need to be,
even though we read the Washington Post and the New York
Times every morning online, we need to be back in the
middle of the fray which is just our Americanization
showing and its not that they don't care.
It's not that they're not sophisticated but they're
at the end of the world and they always have been
at the end of the world, there's a huge Chinese influx
into Great Auckland now which may or may not change things.
And they are having the same problem as the rest of the
world, their new Prime Minister who is an under 40 pregnant
woman who's not married which I love is,
they're talking about pretty serious restrictions on
foreign property buying 'cause they've got a shortage
of places for Kiwis in Auckland and it isn't people like
my wife and I exactly because we're on the beach many
miles away but it's a whole bunch of people who own real
estate and are there two weeks a year.
And it doesn't make a damn bit of difference in London
or New York, it makes a difference in a
country of four million people.
- Parking money basically.
- It's legal or mostly legal money laundering.
We have a good friend who actually has a huge amount of
commercial property and he got a very extraordinary offer
from a Chinese buyer, I don't remember what the upshot
of it was but he said I've really gotta do my do diligence
first and make sure that the money flowing through,
that's it's not laundering, of course, with all due
respect, London is built on money laundering to some
horrible degree so it's going to be so fascinating,
that's really the wrong word, isn't it,
to see what's gonna happen to London over the next 36
months as a function of Brexit.
- Oh my god, what a shocker, unbelievable.
- We had a summer party that was at the end of somebody's
dock and they had a friend who was a Brit, not a
financier, I think he was actually a big time art dealer
and I think it may have been about a week before Brexit
and just because I'm statistically trained and skeptical
about everything, I said something to him like well,
it doesn't seem to me like, it was innocent.
It's necessarily a sure thing, he treated me like
I was a baby, he just slammed me.
He looked at me, his face turned funny color.
He said you just don't get it, there is no issue.
There is no way that this could happen and he just,
the insults were rolling through him which is of course
exactly what we said on the eighth of November in 2016
in the United States so more fool we, fools we.
- That was a year of learning, time to go vote.
- Yeah, that's a nice way to put it.
- So Tom, I wanted to say thank you so much
because your book was fantastic from influence
on me many many years ago, In Search of Excellence.
I remember starting off doing manufacturing engineering
in England, studying for manufacturing engineering.
I looked up at these big old shelves on business
management, I thought I need to read some of these.
I need to get enthused about this discipline.
And a lot of them were not very, kind of stiff
terse books that didn't really summon much by the
way of motivation and I came across your book
and it's the bright light of a four year education
really, so much of a bright light.
You got me to convert to engineering management.
So thank you very much, great to read your new book.
- Well thank you, thank you very much for that comment.
Never gets old.
- So a lot's changed in that time, 26 years
since I've read In Search of Excellence
and now we have the Excellence Dividend.
What would you say has happened in terms of the
business mastery genre 'cause it seems like those
shelves are rather small 26 years ago and now there's
no end of business mastery books so what's changed?
- Well in our case, the Americans, of course
have ruled the roost after World War Two
and suddenly in the mid 70's, we discovered that
everybody was buying Japanese cars and the week that
In Search of Excellence came out in 1982 actually,
the Americans announced 10% unemployment which
was completely unheard of at the time.
And the way I like to say it which certainly played
into my hands or my and my co author's hands was
overnight, the business books moved from the back
of the book store to the front of the book store.
And that certainly was the case.
The part that I can't tell you about because my history
isn't good enough in a way I'd only 80% agree with you.
It was business books and then there was some kind of a
global explosion of self help books in general
that took off at about the same time and I don't know.
Nobody's asked me that question which is to your
everlasting credit, part of it, I guess, which sounds
egocentric is part of it was because our book
was so ludicrously successful.
There was a guy by the name of Bob Towsend.
He actually invented the American Express card.
And he had written a book called Up The Organization
that probably you don't know or what have you.
But it was the first business book to ever make
it onto a Best Seller list and that was four
or five years before us and then we of course,
did make it onto a Best Seller list and stayed on.
So it was an awareness thing and other that that,
I haven't really got a good answer as to why
but you're right, the business book shelves now
just bulge and that's an understatement.
- And they're not that far back on the book shelves.
- No they aren't, they're absolutely aren't.
And every time unemployment goes up or whatever else,
they nudge a little closer to the front for some
period of time. - There was one other
book that I remember which you might recall,
Eli Gold Rats the Goal. - Absolutely.
- That was a great read, I thought.
- And far more than In Search of Excellence in a way
in my experience, the Gold Ratians if that's not a
horrible misuse of the language are religious in their
belief of what's, it's like and this is not said
with any criticism, it's like the people who are,
the other one that comes to mind when you said Gold Rat
is Stephen Covey's Seven Habits which became almost
like a religious discipline and I think there have
been a handful, well, The One Minute Manager.
My college roommate was Kenny Blanchard who was the
co author of the One Minute Manager and that took off.
And he and, was it he or was it somebody else who
was his co author and then there was, which I think
is still selling like hot cakes, do you remember
the one that was called Who Moved My Cheese?
- Yes, exactly, I think the rhythm in succession.
- I'm still not sure what it was about.
But it sure moved off the bookstore shelves.
And like the guy who ran Southwest Airlines,
Herb Kelleher, I believe I heard that Herb bought
a copy of Who Moved My Cheese for each of his 23000
employees so yeah, it's the real deal now.
- You read How I Read 100 Books
and I think that's, I really read the book
and it was very much a tour of force if you like
of the best business books in existence at the stage.
I remember you mentioned The Soft Edge.
You said it was your favorite book of the decade.
- I did. - What was your second?
- Gosh, oh Jesus.
That's, what would be my second?
Well I'm gonna do what any good person on my
side of the conversation does which is not to answer
your question and divert you, let's talk about the 100,
let me do my little riff on the 100 books and then we'll
try, maybe it would be, god, authors name,
there's a book called, here was the deal,
I had the arrogance to believe that for about 20 years
I might have been one eighth of a step ahead of the herd
and then I woke up one morning three or four years ago
and I couldn't even see the tail end of the herd,
mainly as a function of the technology changes.
And thanks to my mother who turned me into a reader
at the age of four, whenever I have a big problem,
my answer is always books and so I thought I'm gonna see
if I can read my way out of my doldrums or whatever you
wanna call it and so I read everything I could get my
hands on in terms of social media, big data, etc.
And my assessment of myself 100 books later is I'm
still sure as hell not an expert but I can
now have intelligent conversations with experts
and that's a big step forward.
That sounds like a pat line and I know I've used it before.
But it's really the truth, I didn't know what else to do
except read my way out of the mess and one of the things
per your point, you always like to get a good book review
but one of the big ones for us as Publishers Weekly
and we got a starred review but what I loved which was
of course a little self serving on their part is they
specifically said at the end of almost every chapter,
there's a reading list and the funny thing about that
is I didn't really know that until they wrote the review.
It's just what I did, just you said, each chapter
has an incredible amount of material that is always
referenced, nothing is made up to the best of my knowledge
and so we end each chapter, my favorite one of my lists
is the one that I call the People First Business Book Club.
Because one of my huge arguments has been that whether it's
2018 or whether it was way back in 1982 a, putting
people first is what matters most.
An organization is people serving people in 2018
as much it was in 1918 at some level.
And a whole bunch of people have done it right.
And so that particular thing says look,
they're 30 books from people who have done it right.
Why don't you and your executive team and I've known this
to happen in some small number of cases, as you probably
have, I said why don't you do a book club?
Why don't you read a book a month and don't pay attention
to me, you don't have to listen to me but read the
books by the people who actually pulled one of these things
off like John Mackey is the Whole Foods guy
and there's a book that, I'm not in love with the title
but I am in love with the content
and it's called Firms, F of Endearment.
That's a little slightly edgy for me but it's the real
deal, it's case studies of 15 or 20 companies that
really got serious about putting employees first
in all kinds of industries and as a result did
extraordinary work, I can't really, what I loved about
the Soft Edge edge by Rich Karlgaard was and this is a
commonality in both your background and mine is it
came from a guy who was a serious mover and shaker
in Silicone Valley, it wasn't The Soft Edge being written
by x or y or z from wherever but Rich is the publisher
of Forbes magazine, Forbes is a tough cookie world.
And yet what he said was over the long haul,
the companies that pay attention to the people issues,
the trust issues, the teamwork issues stand the best
chance of surviving bad as well as good.
And I obviously agree with that.
I wrote the foreword to the book I'm gonna say.
And we said then, we said hard is soft, soft is hard
In Search Of Excellence and Rich,
you said it better than we did.
And that was not a throw away line, it's brilliant.
I recommend it, everybody that's listening or watching.
I'd love to have you buy my book but for sure,
buy The Soft Edge. - The Soft Edge.
And terms of. - Firms.
- Firms of Endearment. - F-I-R-M-S
of Endearment but we have 20 odd books on that list.
And I would pretty much, not pretty much, I did,
I would recommend them in print.
- Now there's another aspect of your book which is amazing.
You mentioned some statistics and some studies that
were done that looked at the more, the balanced businesses,
the businesses that had women on the boards.
And I think there's one statistics, it's amazing
how much more profitable they were.
And so you talk about, we've gotta get the balance correctly
and women are better managers. - Sorry.
There was a McKinsey study that said gender balanced
board companies wildly outperform those who weren't.
And the number in my mind and it's probably the one
you remember because I used very bold type,
56% higher operating profit, I mean, holy moly.
My argument, I started working on women's issues in 1996.
And I really started from the outside in
and what I mean by that is women are the principle
purchasers of everything, roughly the numbers say
and I think this goes across the board, roughly the
numbers say that 80% of consumer goods decisions
including health care, bank accounts as well as where
the family vacation is are made by women
and in the United States and this may or may not be true
outside the US but in the United States,
over 50% of professional purchasing officers are women.
So not only is she deciding on where the family is
gonna go on vacation but it is gonna be her signature
on the 10 year, five billion dollar ISITRFP that goes out.
And there's a lot of evidence that suggests that the
decision making process is significantly different
between men and women, my favorite book on the topic
which is mentioned in the Excellence Dividend
written by the name of a woman named LouAnn Loughton
is called Warren Buffet Invests Like a Girl
and Why You Should Too and I love that.
And the other thing I love about it which is apparently
the case, Buffet had never heard of the book
but somebody sent it to him, presumably the author
and he wrote the first review at Amazon, god bless him
and apparently, I never checked the review out
but apparently he said I never knew I invested like a girl
but I guess I do and it was more about patience.
It was about not getting caught up in the herd.
You and I are sitting across from each other at some
place on Wall Street and you figure you've got the winning
deal of all time and there's only one, I'm not interested
in making money, I'm interested in making more
money than you make and so there's no way in hell
I'm gonna let this thing escape and women got
a slightly smaller does of testosterone than you and I do.
And they don't take crazy risks, it's a fascinating book.
But in general, my point was if you pay attention to your
customer, then you have to pay attention to women
and marketing to women and designing products for women
is not instinctively something that men do particularly well
and I call it in my book, the squint test.
And my point is, I'm not asking for quotas,
no legislation, thank you but I should take a picture,
I look at a picture of your executive team
and it oughta kinda sorta look like the market that's
being served, if 80% of the market is women,
then two token women on a 15 person executive team
just isn't right and then I move from there into
the women in leadership and the women's leadership
argument, I believe as I see it, gets stronger with
every passing day because it is pretty clearly a research
demonstrated fact that women do better in
non hierarchical situations than men do.
Women tend to use the word we more than I.
And males have, always, I'm so critical about this.
And I was doing something actually this morning on Twitter.
I always use the word, two words, tend to.
Because there are men who can listen brilliantly
and women who have tin ears but if we are looking
at two bell shaped curves, women tend to be,
tend to be better listeners than men.
So it's not that all men are schmucks and all women
are superstars in any way, shape or form but in general.
And you're trained in all that stuff too so you
know what I'm talking about.
- I think you mention dating, you do mention dating.
My background's internet dating and you do actually
think, I think you do quote Dataclysm as a book.
Christian Rudder. - Yup, yes.
- Who is the Co founder of OkCupid.
That was a real eye opener of a book.
But I gotta say the internet dating industry
is 70, 80% male, match makers, 80% female.
- That's fascinating.
So I'm the questioner now.
Tell me what the difference in approach is
that leads to one being principally male
and one being principally female.
What's the difference in structure?
There must be a good reason.
- Geeks verses heart and soul.
So the match makers are heart and soul.
And the internet dating companies are geeks.
That's a huge, I don't like blanket statements.
But I think the industry will forgive me for that.
- I'm sure that's the case.
The woman who wrote Brotopia, have you seen that?
- No.
- Brotopia, you've gotta read it because you've
lived in the valley, Brotopia is, you've gotta read it
as long as you have a barf bag in your hand.
It's about some of the true wretched excess in Silicone
Valley but that's neither here nor there.
The thing that was interesting to me, relative to all
the problems to people like Facebook are having now
was one of her things was the fact that women are
underrepresented in terms of coding means that there's
no, I don't know what word to use, female, feminine,
women's sensibility in what the product is that
comes out the other end and you're saying the same
thing with the dating stuff but there are different
sensibilities but try Brotopia if you can stomach it.
- Alright, will do, thank you.
I've got a question from a prolific wisdom member.
James Thomas and so he asked, I'm gonna read it off here.
Imagine a CEO of a traditional conservative company
comes to you asking your advice on shifting his
organizations culture toward recognizing and valuing
the softer stuff, he and the majority of the other
employees are technical types, obsessed with numbers,
metric systems, geeks if you like and proceeded,
what would you suggest to such a CEO as a first
step recognize the value of soft stuff?
Where does he start?
- Well there are good, bad and indifferent
executive coaches and a lot of people who can
barely spell the word executive who hang out at Shingle.
I would wanna spend a significant amount of time with him
before I agreed to take up his challenge because
culture is not some trip you lay on an organization.
The example I gave which maybe is what I would give to
him as his first book to read is McKinsey when we
did our In Search of Excellence work was not too keen on
the term Corporate Culture and we're looked at as
pariahs, we're looking at this soft stuff.
And the King of the Hill in saying strategy first,
strategy second, strategy forever was Lou Gerstner
and Gerstner went on from McKinsey to run a big hunk
of American Express to be the CEO of RJR Nabisco
and then got called in to do what looked like a near
impossible turn around of IBM.
And he wrote a book and I think I'm accurate on the
title here that said Who Said Elephants Can't Dance?
And it was about his 10 year turn around at IBM.
But what he says at one point is when I came in,
I believed in strategy, metrics and so on.
What I discovered along the way was culture is not
part of the game, culture is the game.
But presumably and I either didn't read it closely enough
or what have you, I would assume that that realization
took Lou quite a while and quite a lot of discussion.
And so I would never say hire a strategy guru.
I would never say hire the good guys at McKinsey
and they do a lot of it.
I really think there's gotta be an enormous amount of
soul searching and it's not an off sight
and it's finding a handful.
I mean, maybe what you do which is always and this
goes back to my McKinsey days is if it's a big company
and the question you've been asked to do is find a place
that's doing it, in my second book, Passion for Excellence
Nancy Austin and I called it pockets of excellence.
Find a small division somewhere and that's the Gerstner
thing because he found some little, I don't know
what language I'm allowed to use on this particular
conversation, he found some little piss ant group
somewhere outside of London and today they're called
IBM Global Services which is half the company.
But find somebody who gets it.
Find somebody on your team, preferably somebody
who's running Malaysia and doing things very differently.
But I would never sit down and say one, do this,
two, do that, three, do this, no way.
You've gotta develop a feeling for it.
And if I was the would be consultant, I would think
long and hard before I accepted his challenge.
Because did it come because he bought a copy of
Soft Edge or maybe my book and read it?
Or has he really been noodling on it
because it's a deep seated psychological change
and as I say a couple of times when I'm talking about
some of the women's stuff and so on,
I am not talking about a women's initiative for 2018.
I am talking about a strategic realignment of the
institution and so it ain't easy.
And you really gotta be sure and you really
need some partners, at least a handful of ya
so I think what I've just done is in a way evaded the
question but I said what I believe.
It's not one, two, three, bingo, bingo, bingo.
I'd love to read my book and god will smile
on from now until the end of time but I'm afraid
I'm too old to believe that.
- Oh, but it does work wonderfully as a handbook though.
I mean, as I read through it, there are actually,
there's so many wonderful quotes.
But there was one quote that made me laugh.
There was one quote that made me cry.
Let me share those with you.
- Oh brilliant, I'm here on the other side of the
world excited to hear what comes next, I'm really serious.
Okay, what are we gonna start with, laugh or cry?
- Start with laughter so it was on the subject on listening,
intense listening and you quoted Will Rogers
and Will Rogers said never miss a chance,
never miss a good chance to shut up.
- I know, isn't that lovely, that, honest to god, blowing
my own horn, that's worth the price of the book alone.
- And then leading up to the one that led me to cry.
Just to kind of duck tail this into conversation,
the CEO's role seems to have morph,
vision is no longer enough to be sure.
And a great demonstration of that is of course,
Steve Jobs and we talk about design and innovation
and you quote Lauren Jobs, this was a real eye opener.
Steve and Johnny would discuss, this is the quote.
Steve and Johnny would discuss corners for hours and hours.
That just struck me as simultaneously completely crazy
and amazing but then you quote a book Boys In The Boat.
About the eight man crew. - Oh my god.
I'm gonna cry listening to you talk about this, yeah.
- So there's an eight man crew from the University of
Washington that won the 1936 Olympics and the boat
builder, a guy by the name of George Pocock who talked
about building the boat and said you had to give
yourself up to it spiritually.
You had to surrender yourself absolutely to it.
Like holy, my goodness. - No, no, absolutely.
There's another little story I tell which I think
is consistent about that and that is when my wife
and I went to visit some friends in Chicago which is
of course restaurant city in the US and for New Year's
Eve we went to this fabulous restaurants that's one of
the most glorious restaurants in the city so everybody
has their last drink, finishes up a little after the
New Year's bell rings at 12:30, you walk out in front
of the restaurant, this woman who runs it, owns it,
is god in the restaurant world and was beautifully dressed
for New Year's Eve, its a Chicago January the first.
The temperature's about zero, the wind it about 80 knots.
She is standing out in the street hailing caps.
This was I think maybe 10 years ago and a little
bit of pre Uber, per Lyft or something hailing caps.
But it's that intimate connection, I love the George
Pocock thing, oh my god, did you read the book?
- I've not read that, no.
- When you get that, when you go to Amazon and get it,
make sure you get the hard copy, hard back copy
because the hard back copy has photos and it's just,
no, I'm with you and to me, that's what a really
great business enterprise of six or 66,000 oughta be about.
I remember reading, I don't know if this was in Isaacson's
biography or not or Jobs that Jobs would sneak off
and I guess he had the skill to sneak even when he was
a big deal and he would go to Japan for a couple of weeks
and he would go sit in the tea gardens again and somebody,
everybody talks to me about hustling and the need for speed
in product design, somebody was just asking me about that
today, I said don't forget, Jobs never came within 18 months
of delivering a product on time.
It was not until it was ready to go.
The talking about corners, there's another quote
in there from an Apple graduate Tony Fadell who runs Nest
who I think was bought by Google maybe but he
talks about the screws that go into a Nest thermostat
and he calls them epic screws, screws with meaning.
And you laugh yourself silly if nine out of 10 people
said that but he means it, he really means it.
And I think which of course is the whole bloody point of
the book on some level, that's the differentiator
against the wholesale intrusion of AI that will
service will, look, you know this material better than I do.
There's a famous Oxford study that said we're gonna get
overrun by AI within 10 to 20 years.
There are people who are equally bright who say
it's 25 to 40 years, my point is it's not gonna
be the next five to 10 years and I'm not talking in terms
of my advanced age, I will take a child like yourself.
We have to make it through the next five years.
And what are you gonna, there's this wonderful quote
in the book that doesn't make me cry but it's
Linda Caplan Failer who started an ad agency which was her
ad agency, somebody bought 'em eventually.
She's in the advertising hall of fame and it's this
wonderful quote from Ad Age and she said
don't you dare think about vision for one minute.
She said we grew this agency, we did fabulous work
and we have only one goal in life
and that was to do our absolute best for our client today
and I nearly titled the book Excellence is the Next Five
Minutes and I've actually upped my game in that regard
since the book came out and you're welcome to disagree
with me but I've said to the busy executive or non
executive, excellence is your next 10 line email.
I am not trained in psychiatry so what I'm saying may
not be entirely accurate but I believe relative to you,
I believe your boss, your leader of something that I could
do a pretty complete psychiatric analysis of you
based on a 10 line email, I can see who you are
as a human being and call me arrogant.
But I think I'm right about that.
Is there some grace to it?
Is there some thoughtfulness to it?
Is there some humanity even though the topic
at hand is supposedly that your project is a bit behind
and I think I can nail you to the wall in terms of that.
And so that's excellence and if your next,
if my next email to you, who's one of my division
general managers or if your division, I'm a general
division manager one of my department heads,
if my email to you is really all wrong tonally
and this gets back to your earlier question about
changing culture too, if my email's all wrong,
then forget all this other stuff.
And as I said, I'm hands shaking in rage about this.
10 lines and I gotcha, I haven't tried it with any of my
shrink friends to see if they would agree with me or not.
I may actually.
- It reminds me of a book The Secret Life of Pronouns.
- I don't know that but I love the title.
I'm gonna write it down.
- So people tell you everything, listen, observe.
- It's in the book about Mayo Clinic which always comes
out as the top health care provider in the US year
after year after year and if you're the world's hottest
shot heart surgeon and I'm interviewing you for a job,
when you see me looking down and scratching with a pen
on my arm, what I'm doing during the interview is
counting the number of times you use the word we
and the number of times you use the word I.
And if you blow the we I test even though your
nickname is God, you don't get a job.
(talking over each other inaudibly)
Sorry? - Do you think that's
a good, one of the things that you mentioned in the
book that's very important to hire people with
good empathetic ability, do you think
that's a good way of measuring empathy then, the we I test?
- I would think it is, you can do everything wrong.
But I think you could maybe make it slightly more generic.
That their point was and Larry Bossidy in his book
Execution said the same thing.
He said when I'm interviewing a would be executive
and he used the pronoun she, it's not my bias in
that regard in doing this but said when I'm interviewing
a would be executive, does she talk about the
accomplishments of her team or to use his language
and I think I'm pretty close on this,
or does she keep wandering back to strategy and policy?
But is it about the team and what we got done
and this amazing thing that we got done when we built
our new facility in six weeks instead of six months
and I think, there's another one which is just about my
favorite and one of my, it didn't bring you to tears
Pocock brought you to tears but the one that almost
brings me to tears is the guy who runs the mid size
Pharmaceutical company who says we only hire nice people.
And what he says which is something that the Bros in
Silicone Valley could take a lot more seriously is he
says look, I know it's advanced micro biology
but there are a lot of people who are good at advanced
micro biology, why would you hire the jerks?
And then he uses, yeah, the old one liner
but he presumably means it and he says the one,
this is a small to middle size growth company.
He said one bad relative to our friend who wants the
culture change that one bad apple can spoil the basket.
And then there's my friend Bob Sutten who teaches
at the Stamford Business School and Stamford Design School
who is the author of The No Asshole Rule
and now The Asshole Survival Guide.
It's the same point, you don't have to do this.
You don't have to live and my point is which is the joy
of being 1,000 years old, my comment about myself
is I have only one test about my life.
Can I walk past a mirror without barfing?
And it's always a function of how you treated people.
And when I'm doing my PowerPoint version and I think I
say this in words at some point in the book.
I've got a slide that has a tombstone and the tombstone
says Joe N Jones, net worth, $25,417,813.16
per end when the market closed yesterday.
And my comment is you've never seen a tombstone
like that, have you, when you go to the memorial service
and I'm stealing from Peggy Noonan who was a Reagan
speech writer, writes for the Wall Street Journal
and wrote about the sad premature death of one of our
great political corespondents Tim Russert
and she said at the end of the day we always say
how did he treat people and it's really true.
And I spoke to a bunch of a senior middle managers one
time, they were probably 45 year olds.
And I said look, you got 20 years left to go.
Let me tell you what you're gonna remember at 65.
You're gonna remember the people you helped.
You're gonna remember that person who you helped develop
who went on and he killed you by leaving the company
but then he did something wonderful and he's the one
who's gonna be in that last interior photograph in
your mind before you pass away to bigger or smaller things.
And I'm not a religious person, I don't darken many
church doors but it's your Pocock point.
To me, you don't have to use the word organized religion
and spiritual in the same dimension.
I totally believe in organized religion.
That's not the point, it's just that I'm not standing on
a pulpit and whacking you over the head with a bible.
- It just seems like there's some realization
over the last several years that people are motivated
by purpose and Steve Jobs managed to create a work force
that believed in computers as an art,
computers as a thing of beauty.
So let me pivot a question from my friend
Boris Serveroff and he asked most authors discover
something new in the process of writing,
what were your personal aha's while
working on the excellence dividend?
- Wow.
- I'm sure there were a lot of them, my goodness.
- Well there were a couple that stand out.
And you can find 'em in the table of contents.
I had no intention of doing, I did a People section,
no surprise, I had no intention of doing a separate
chapter on training and I ended up a separate chapter
on training and moreover, I said training is investment
number one, that came as a surprise.
In my leadership section, there is a chapter which
says asset number one in your sizable company
is the full population of first line supervisors.
They are responsible for quality, productivity,
employee retention and so on.
I knew it was something I cared about.
I knew it was something I talked about.
But it's like when I look at the table of contents today
I say oh my god, how did that happen?
But I really felt this compulsion.
I wrote the chapters and these two things were
part of the chapters, the third one, which you mentioned.
The third one is listening.
And listening is a separate chapter.
And I call 'em incidentally training is investment
number one, first line supervisors are assets number one
and effective listening is core value number one.
And if you had asked me when I started the book whether
I would a, say that or b, that these would be separate
chapters, I would've even not known what the hell
you were talking about so I guess that fits his definition
to a very significant degree.
And the listening one, as you may recall, the first
chapter in the book is about Execution.
There was a lot of coin tossing that went on
because I couldn't decide whether I wanted to put
listening first or execution first and ended up
with execution but it was that high on my list.
So those three number ones, first line supervisors,
listening and training surprised the heck out of me
as to where they ended up in the contents list.
I look at it today and say did you write that?
- So the book was a journey of discovery really?
As you were writing it, you were bringing together
your thoughts. - Yeah.
- Yeah from your prior books.
- Initially started out as a summary of everything.
And we called it exotic title, The Works
which is not terribly exciting and relative to an earlier
question you asked, it actually came from some teaching
I was doing at the University of Auckland Business School
because when we go for our two months each winter,
I go up to Auckland for about 10 days and talk at the
business school, I love it, it's wonderful.
It's wonderful and since I can take aim at you and myself,
it's wonderful because it's not Harvard or Stamford.
But what I mean by that and you did this
and you told me about your Harvard thing
is it tends to be 35 year olds who came back to school
because they had a need in their own mind for education
and some of us do it at Harvard.
Some of us do it at Stamford but it's not quite that
kind of famous level of school but people are there
because they wanna be there as opposed to the fact
it's what you oughta do and I love working people
who are getting MBA more than smart ass little
suckers like myself when I went to Stamford in 1970.
- I think there's a whole other book that could be written
about disintermediation of education.
Ultimately, I remember doing a course and I had a comment
that was in the moment, I think she said everybody
deserves a Harvard education, ultimately the teachers,
the fantastic teachers, I think of Con Academy,
there are just such brilliant teachers out there.
And then there are facilitators.
And I think I can see a day when, you see this trend
in career, maybe that's a subject for another book.
- Yeah, there's some mixed models and the mixed model
is do your MOOCs and then have some opportunities
to meet face to face, years ago there was a women
who worked for my wife who was her marketing director
and she got an MBA at Duke from the Fuqua School.
And it was a distance MBA and it was a little before
MOOC was in the language but the deal was that they
came to Duke for a couple weeks each year and met
face to face, there was another school that I actually
did a graduation speech for that was a local school in
Vermont and it was really fun.
It was the same sort of program but they were finishing
up two years of online stuff and they never met each other
but the graduation, in order to get your degree,
you had to show up for the graduation and so there's some
which is kind of a sub text of the new book in a way,
there's some sweet spot of a combination of using the
technology to its fullest and keeping the humanity
and I think it's possible to find that sweet spot.
I've gotta go in pretty short order so if you've
got a last question that will summarize
everything, I would love to give it a shot.
- I've got one quick last question from Chovas Eavied
and he asks looking back on your career,
what would you do differently?
He's going through some things right now
where he's thinking about this question.
And he asked me to put the question to you.
What would you do differently?
- Very little.
I never had a goal, I never had a career plan.
I went with the wind and the wind has been incredibly kind
to me at the right moments, I mean.
I'd love to say something like do what you love.
But I didn't start doing what I loved until I
accidentally fell into it and it wasn't I really wanna
do this behavioral science, I'm an engineer.
My grandfather was a German engineer who immigrated to
the United States in 1873, I dream in numbers
and I have 17 years of advanced calculus training.
If you ask me why the hell I ended up talking about
people and organizational behavior, wasn't my idea.
I got lucky, I went to Stamford Business School when
I got out of the Navy and I had a professor of
organizational behavior and he saw something in me.
And we became friends and the rest, so I just,
I can't give a good answer.
The only answer and it's, I don't think it's very helpful
to our questioner is that I talk about and it is the
excellence thing, it's if you're a junior person,
it's always possible to turn a crappy little task
into an island of excellence and the way I describe it
is if you're the 24 year old who is asked to organize
the Memorial Day picnic for your 30 person department,
that's a golden opportunity, you can make it into the
biggest hoe down hootenanny great fun and that's,
your questioner is at an 87 levels more senior to that.
But it's and this sounds, I hate cheesy answers.
And it's back to that email, it's like, I said
I called a speech excellence when I was at McKinsey
because I had just come from a performance by the
San Francisco Ballet and I said if a Ballet can be
excellence, why the hell can't a business organization
be excellence and there's something I just read and I wish
I could recall it better but it said that fundamentally
excellence is the way you lead your life and somebody
asked the elder Tom Watson, the IBM founder.
They said how long does it take to achieve excellence?
And he said one minute, he said you achieve excellence
by saying I will never knowingly do anything again
that's not excellent and so I think it's the way you
approach your life and I can't say things like grab
opportunities because that has nothing to do with my life.
One thing that's really important to me and this is
almost the anthesis of the answer, is I don't like mass
murderers and I don't like rapists.
Those are number one and number two on my list of hated
human beings, number three is successful
people who think they deserve their success, it really is.
Nassim Nicolas Taleb wrote a book called
Fooled By Randomness and he said if you're lucky enough
to be born of intelligent parents and if you work your
back side off, the odds are pretty high that you'll
have a pretty successful career.
If it's better than that, you were lucky.
And when people say deserve, I say, yeah sure,
I deserve it, I was born in 1942 in the United States
of America, I was white, I was male and I was Protestant
and Protestant meant a hell of a lot in those days.
That was the first 99.8% and the rest is details.
One time said a guy who was chaffering me around
London actually and he had driven Mac Jagger around
and what I remember him saying to me is he said ya know,
I have two kinds of people in the back of this car.
People who remember their roots and people
who think they deserve to be there.
And I thought that was as wise a comment as I've ever heard
and I can't say stupid things like go for it or what have
you but it's that next five line email.
I wrote it, on my 60th birthday I wrote,
I've forgotten what it was called but I do know
what it was called, it's called 60 and it was 60 ideas
or 60 things that had influenced me and the last one
which actually a Presbyterian Preacher asked me about
my Presbyterianism as a result, the last one was grace.
And Grace is a beautiful word and grace is, in a way,
Johnny and Steve talking about corners for hours
or our great friend, Mr Pocock who left his heart and his
soul in a cruise shell, I must say when they were
still made out of wood before the worm turned.
But it's a way of living and it's, the obvious one
which is religious with a lower case r,
it's caring about people, what's to lose, right?
What's to lose and there's everything to gain.
- Tom Peters, you're the author of In Search of Excellence
and more recently The Excellence Dividend.
Thank you so much for you time, we do appreciate your time.
- It's my great pleasure, thank you
for the opportunity to chat.
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