Leading the 21st century organization

I have been a fan of Tom Peters (author of “In Search of Excellence” and many more books) for more than 20 years.

While CAE at Tosco Corporation, I attended a presentation by him on something he called Wow! The concept, which I not only wrote about for the Internal Auditor magazine in 2001 but tried to incorporate into my internal audit practice, is to turn every project into something that you would tell your grandchildren about (Wow! indeed).

Tom is now 71 but hasn’t slowed down. He is amazingly actively presenting all over the world, writing books, and on Twitter (where we interact from time to time).

Recently, he was interviewed by McKinsey and I recommend reading the full piece. Here are some excerpts.

“My real bottom-line hypothesis is that nobody has a sweet clue what they’re doing. Therefore you better be trying stuff at an insanely rapid pace. You want to be screwing around with nearly everything. Relentless experimentation was probably important in the 1970s—now it’s do or die.”

“…the secret to success is daydreaming.”

“If you take a leadership job, you do people. Period. It’s what you do. It’s what you’re paid to do. People, period. Should you have a great strategy? Yes, you should. How do you get a great strategy? By finding the world’s greatest strategist, not by being the world’s greatest strategist. You do people.”

“We’re in the big-change business, aren’t we? Isn’t that the whole point? I mean, any idiot with a high IQ can invent a great strategy. What’s really hard is fighting against the unwashed masses and pulling it off—although there’s nothing stupider than saying change is about overcoming resistance. Change is about recruiting allies and working each other up to have the nerve to try the next experiment. You find allies. You encircle the buggers.”

“I’m more than willing to say that today’s two year old is going to deal with his or her fellow human beings differently than you or I do. But the reality is it’s 2014, not 2034, and I would argue that for the next 20 years, we’re still safe believing in the importance of face-to-face contact. I’m not arguing against virtual meetings, but I’m telling you that if I’m running IBM, I want to be on the road 200 days a year as much in 2014 as in 2004 or in 1974. It has nothing to do with the value of the tools, but I’ve got to see you face to face now and then; I don’t think I can do it all screen to screen.”

“At some deep level, people are people, and so I believe passionately that there is no difference between leading now and leading then. What I certainly believe is that anybody who is leading a sizable institution who doesn’t do what I did and take a year off and read or what have you, and who doesn’t embrace the new technology with youthful joy and glee, is out of business.”

This last is 100% consistent with the quote from another McKinsey Quarterly issue I used in Management for the Next 50 Years:

“Those who understand the depth, breadth, and radical nature of the change and opportunity that’s on the way will be best able to reset their intuitions accordingly, shape this new world, and thrive.”

Do you agree?

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