Overture

1. In Search of Excellence/1982-2012Excellence Attribute #1:A Bias For Action!Tom Peters/17 February 2012

2. The research on what became In Search of Excellence began in 1977. The first publication of our fledgling effort appeared in BusinessWeek in July 1978. It included a list of eight “attributes of excellence” teased from our mountain of data. The first of the eight was, “Do it. Fix it. Try it.” To our surprise as much as anyone else’s, the eight attributes stayed intact through a gajillion drafts and presentations and then the book’s publication in 1982, though a word or two did change. Now #1 was “A Bias for Action.” This is the 30th anniversary of the book’s appearance, and while much has changed, if I were to update it, “A Bias for Action” would retain its #1 spot. If possible, in fact, it’s even more important in these destabilized times. One recent research effort, aimed at advising bosses on adapting to the whacky [now and forever more] times, suggested that the #1 key to success was “experiment fearlessly.” Sounds suspiciously like “a bias for action” to me!Along the way, no surprise, I’ve collected a ton of “stuff” on this dear-to-my-head-and-heart topic—in my MOAP/Mother Of All Presentations the bias for action animates a prominent section, which is one of the longest. But I thought that in the process I’d pass this version, un-annotated, along in the “for what it’s worth” category.A Bias for Action. FIRST in 1982. FIRST in 2012. And no change predicted—for institutions OR individuals!

3. Overture

4. “We have a ‘strategic plan.’ It’s called doing things.”— Herb Kelleher

5. “Execution isstrategy.”—Fred Malek

6. “Can do!”**U.S. Naval Mobile Construction Battalions/Seabee motto

7. READY.FIRE!AIM.—Ross Perot (vs. “Aim! Aim! Aim!”)

8. BLAME NO ONE. EXPECT NOTHING. DO SOMETHING. Source: Locker room sign posted by NFL football coach Bill Parcells

9. "Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You simply must … Do things.”—Ray Bradbury

10. John Boyd:“To Be somebody or to Do something”BOYD: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Robert Coram)

11. Fall seven times, stand up eight —Japanese proverb

12. “You miss 100% of the shots you never take.”—WayneGretzky

13. The Action FactionBossidy+Perot+Peters & WatermanPeters+Hayek+BoydKelley+Grant+Nelson+

14. Bossidy+

15. Former GE Vice Chairman-former Allied CEO Larry Bossidy, a tough-as-they-come operating executive, wrote, with business guru Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. Absurd as it may sound, this may well be the first primetime book on execution per se. And a remarkable book it is. And execution is, of course, first and foremost a “bias for action” game!

16. “Execution is the jobof the business leader.”—Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/ Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

17. “I saw that leaders placed too much emphasis on what some call high-level strategy, on intellectualizing and philosophizing, and not enough on implementation. People would agree on a project or initiative, and then nothing would come of it.”—Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

18. “The person who is a little less conceptual but is absolutely determined to succeed will usually find the right people and get them together to achieve objectives. I’m not knocking education or looking for dumb people. But if you have to choose between someone with a staggering IQ and an elite education who’s gliding along, and someone with a lower IQ but who is absolutely determined to succeed, you’ll always do better with the second person.” —Larry Bossidy (Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/ Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done)

19. “The head of one of the large management consulting firms asks [members of a client organization, ‘And what do you do that justifies your being on the payroll?’ The great majority answer, ‘I run the accounting department,’ or ‘I am in charge of the sales force’ … Only a few say, ‘It’s my job to give our managers the information they need to make the right decisions,’ or ‘I am responsible for finding out what products the customer will want tomorrow.’ The man who focuses on efforts and stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his rank or title.But the man who focuses on contributions and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase, ‘top management.’ He holds himself responsible for the performance of the whole.”—Peter Drucker

20. “When assessing candidates, the first thing I looked for was energy and enthusiasm for execution. Does she talk about the thrill of getting things done, the obstacles overcome, the role her people played—or does she keep wandering back to strategy or philosophy?”—Larry Bossidy, Execution

21. WOW!!Observed closely: The use of“I”or“we”during a job interview. Source: Leonard Berry & Kent Seltman, chapter 6, “Hiring for Values,” Management Lessons From Mayo Clinic

22. “Execution is asystematic process of rigorously discussing hows and whats, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability.”—Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/ Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

23. The Leader’s Seven Essential Behaviors*Know your people and your business*Insist on realism*Set clear goals and priorities*Follow through*Reward the doers*Expand people’s capabilities*Know yourselfSource: Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

24. “Realism is the heart of execution.”—Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

25. (1) Sum of Projects = Goal (“Vision”)(2) Sum of Milestones = Project(3) Rapid Review + Truth-telling = Accountability

26. “robust dialogue”—Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/ Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

27. Beware the “Can’t Do” Merchants!“Andrew Higgins, who built landing craft in WWII, refused to hire graduates of engineering schools. He believed that they only teach you what you can’t do in engineering school. He started off with 20 employees, and by the middle of the war had 30,000 working for him. He turned out 20,000 landing craft. D.D. Eisenhower told me, ‘Andrew Higgins won the war for us. He did it without engineers.’” —Stephen Ambrose/Fast Company

28. "Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You simply must … Do things.”—Ray Bradbury

29. “Intelligent people can always come up with intelligent reasons … to do nothing.”—Scott Simon

30. "Never be afraid to try; remember ... amateurs built the ark, professionals built the Titanic."—Author Unknown

31. Ye gads:“Thomas Stanley has not only found no correlation between success in school and an ability to accumulate wealth, he’s actually found a negative correlation.‘It seems that school-related evaluations are poor predictors of economic success,’ Stanley concluded. ‘What did predict success was a willingness to take risks. Yet the success-failure standards of most schools penalized risk takers. Most educational systems reward those who play it safe. As a result, those who do well in school find it hard to take risks later on.’”—Richard Farson & Ralph Keyes, Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins

32. “Tom, we normally start at … 6:15A.M.”**GE [of course—which is my point here] sector boss informs me that he’s giving me a break—my speech will start at a slovenly 6:30AM

33. “Can do!”**U.S. Naval Mobile Construction Battalions/Seabee motto

34. Dick/DAY (Build! Period!)Dan/NIGHT (Flawless report on what not built)**My two Seabee commanding officers (Vietnam/1966-1968): Richard Anderson, Daniel ________

35. “Execution isstrategy.”—Fred Malek

36. “Costco has figured out the big,simple things and executedwith total fanaticism.”—Charles Munger, Berkshire Hathaway

37. “In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. Pick a general direction … andimplementlikehell.”—Jack Welch

38. Perot+

39. READY.FIRE!AIM.—Ross Perot (vs. “Aim! Aim! Aim!”)

40. The larger than life H. Ross Perot sold EDS to GM in the 1980s, and went on the car giant’s Board. A few years later he was asked by a Fortune writer to explain the difference between the two companies. He said that at EDS the strategy was marked by unrelenting urgency. He called it … “Ready. Fire. Aim.” I.e., stop talking and get on with it—now! By comparison, he said, at GM the “strategy” was one of constant delay, or “Ready. Aim. Aim. Aim. Aim . …” (Alas, well into the 1st decade of the new century GM’s problems/ unwieldy bureaucracy remained pretty much unchanged.)

41. 1950-1980: R.A.F./Ready. Aim. Fire. 1980-2000: R.F.A./Ready. Fire! Aim. 2000-20??: F.F.F./Fire! Fire! Fire!

42. “We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect,we’re already on prototype version No. 5.By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on versionNo. 10.It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan —for months.”—Bloomberg by Bloomberg

43. “Burt Rutan wasn’t a fighter jock; he was an engineer who had been asked to figure out why the F-4 Phantom was flying pilots into the ground in Vietnam. While his fellow engineers attacked such tasks with calculators, Rutan insisted on considering the problem in the air. A near-fatal flight not only led to a critical F-4 modification, it also confirmed for Rutan a notion he had held ever since he had built model airplanes as a child.The way to make a better aircraft wasn’t to sit around perfecting a design, it was to get something up in the air and see what happens, then try to fix whatever goes wrong.” —Eric Abrahamson & David Freedman, Chapter 8, “Messy Leadership,”from A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder

44. “What are Rutan’s management rules? He insists he doesn’t have any. ‘I don’t like rules,’ he says. ‘Things are so easy to change if you don’t write them down.’ Rutan feels good management works in much the same way good aircraft design does:Instead of trying to figure out the best way to do something and sticking to it, just try out an approach and keep fixing it.” —Eric Abrahamson & David Freedman, Chapter 8, “Messy Leadership,”from A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder

45. “Downplaying up-front design, not matching employees’ tasks to their experience and training, eschewing specialization, creating a culture that glorifies questions and mistakes, not acting like a CEO—how has all this worked out for Rutan? Scaled Composites has managed 88 consecutive profitable quarters in an industry that is perennially profit challenged. The firm’s regular clients include NASA and most of the big aerospace companies—and it is known as the go-to concern when a need arises for an aircraft that flies higher or faster or farther or more nimbly or less expensively than any other has.Scaled Composites has rolled out 26 new types of aircraft in 30 years, at a time when giant aerospace companies struggle to get a single new aircraft out in a decade.” —Eric Abrahamson & David Freedman, Chapter 8, “Messy Leadership,” A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder

46. “One Rutan principle is not to worry so much about the formal background of the engineers he hires or to look for the sorts of specialties normally sought after by aerospace companies. Instead, he looks for people who share his passion for aircraft design and who can work on anything from a fuselage to a door handle or are willing to learn how. He then gives those people free rein.”—Eric Abrahamson & David Freedman, Chapter 8, “Messy Leadership,” A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder

47. “A Rutan principle is that it’s useful to have everyone questioning everything the company does all the time, and especially have people questioning their own work. Rutan makes sure that when employees point out their mistakes, they’re applauded rather than reprimanded.”—Eric Abrahamson & David Freedman, Chapter 8, “Messy Leadership,” A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder

48. Culture of Prototyping“Effective prototyping may be themost valuablecore competence an innovative organization can hope to have.”—Michael Schrage

49. Think about It!Innovation = Reaction to the Prototype**E.g., No prototype, nothing to think about.Source: Michael Schrage

50. “Demo or die!” Source: This was the approach championed by NicholasNegroponte which vaulted his MITMediaLab to the forefront of IT-multimedia innovation. It was his successful alternative to the traditional MIT-academic “publish or perish.” Negroponte’s rapid-prototyping version was emblematic of the times and the pace and the enormity of the opportunity. (NYTimes/0426.11)