NOTE : To appreciate this presentation [and insure that it is not a mess ], you need Microsoft fonts: “Showcard Goth

1. NOTE:To appreciate this presentation [and insure that it is not amess], you need Microsoft fonts:“Showcard Gothic,”“Ravie,”“Chiller”and “Verdana”

2. Tom Peters’EXCELLENCE. ALWAYS. Action. New Master/05 September 2008

3. This presentation has taken me 40+ years to write.* *Twenty-three-year-old Navy Seabee in Vietnam to 40-year-old co-author of In Search of Excellence from Palo Alto-Silicon Valley to65-year-old “management guy”/“teller of tales” in Vermont

4. “A year from now you may wish You had started today.” —Karen Lamb

5. “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”—Agatha Christie

6. “Action is the foundational key of all success.”—Picasso

7. BLAME NOBODY. EXPECT NOTHING. DOSOMETHING. Source: Locker room sign posted by football coach Bill Parcells

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

9. “The secret to having good ideas is to have a lot of ideas, then throw the bad ones away.”—Linus Pauling

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

11. “Ninety percent of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.”– Peter Drucker

12. EXCELLENCE.CIRCA 1982.A BIAS FOR ACTION.

13. “We design intelligent strategies—but they fail or fall miles short of their apparent potential for one reason—poor organizational alignment which in turn leads to a gaping ‘implementation deficit.’ Tom, I want you to get a handle on the best thinking and best practices on ‘organization effectiveness’ from around the world.”—Ron Daniel, Managing Director, McKinsey & Co., 1977, charge to the team (Tom Peters & Jim Bennett) that five years later produced In Search of Excellence (Tom Peters & Bob Waterman)

14. Daniel was McKinsey’s new Managing Director in 1977. Under competitive threat from the upstart Boston Consulting Group, Daniel decided to re-stock McKinsey’s intellectual capital (as we call it today) inventory. He started “the Big Project” in New York (headquarters) …a fresh look at business strategy. As an afterthought, more or less, he started a little project on the way organizations work—and called on me, junior but fresh from having just finished what Stanford business school organizations guru Professor Gene Webb called “the first Ph.D. dissertation on implementation per se.” Guided by my designated overseer, Jim Bennett, I began an around-the-world tour searching for the most innovative ideas on the subject. (Two decades later, the spin-offs from that “little” project had generated what became McKinsey’s biggest “practice”—Organization Effectiveness.)

15. Excellence1982: The Bedrock “Eight Basics” 1. A Bias for Action 2. Close to the Customer 3. Autonomy and Entrepreneurship 4. Productivity Through People 5. Hands On, Value-Driven 6. Stick to the Knitting 7. Simple Form, Lean Staff 8. Simultaneous Loose-Tight Properties”

16. After two years of research, I produced a “famous” presentation with its title taken from the world of football: “Two Yards and a Cloud of Dust.” The idea was a focus on the “grubby basics” that underlie a winning obsession with execution. The presentation eventually morphed into In Search of Excellence. And, in turn, the centerpiece of the book was our so-called “eight basics.” The first of these was labeled “a bias for action.”

17. TP/BW on BigCompany Sin #1:“too much talk, too little do”

18. “Operations ispolicy.”—Fred Malek (1974)“Execution is strategy.”—TP (1983)

19. “Never forget implementation boys. In our work it’s what I call the ‘missing 98 percent’ of the client puzzle.”—Al McDonald, former Managing Director, McKinsey & Co, to a project team that included TP

20. EXCELLENCE.CIRCA 2008.A BIAS FOR ACTION.

21. 1. A Bias for Action 2. Close to the Customer 3. Autonomy and Entrepreneurship 4. Productivity Through People 5. Hands On, Value-Driven 6. Stick to the Knitting 7. Simple Form, Lean Staff 8. Simultaneous Loose-Tight Properties”

22. A quarter of a century has passed since In Search of Excellence, but as the pace of change accelerates madly, “a bias for action” is, if possible, more important than ever—and as elusive as ever in sizeable organizations. (For that matter, the rest of the “eight basics” are still just that—basic and as about as relevant as ever.)

23. EXCELLENCE. INNOVATE. OR. DIE.

24. 1/40

25. I have said in many settings that, alas, but more or less seriously, I have only had oneidea in the forty years of my professional career …

26. Try it. Try it. Try it. Try it. Try it. Screw it up. Try it. Try it. Try it. Try it. Try it. Try it. Try it. Screw it up. Screw it up. Try it. Try it. try it. Try it.Screw it up. Try it. Try it. Try it.

27. … and that one idea? He/she who has the most tries wins. Are there caveats? Of course! But more or less the person who proceeds by … try it … adjust it … try it again. And again & again & again. (And do it all at flank speed.) (As you’ll subsequently see, one wise commentator goes so far as to say, “Whoever makes the most mistakes wins.” I agree!)

28. Jane Jacobs:Exuberant Varietyvs. the Great Blight of Dullness. F.A. Hayek:Spontaneous Discovery Process.Joseph Schumpeter: theGales of Creative Destruction.

29. There are several grand philosophers who champion my view—and in whose footprints I humbly walk. Nobel prize winner F.A. Hayek, our foremost philosopher of free markets. (His writing was mostly done in the face of totalitarian planned economies.) Hayek called progress via free markets the “spontaneous discovery process.” (Most tries = Most innovation = Longterm economic excellence.) Urban philosopher Jane Jacobs flew in the fade of centralizing urban planners—who brought us the debacle of high-rise public housing, among other things. She said the most vital communities were marked by “exuberant variety”—all sorts of uses mixed wildly together was the winning formula for quality of life and economic prowess.Economist Joseph championed the “gales of creative destruction” as the key to economic renewal.As I see it, each of these says, more or less, “most tries wins.”

30. What makes God laugh?

31. Peoplemakingplans!

32. "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.”—John Lennon

33. “The secret of fast progress is inefficiency, fast and furious and numerous failures.”—Kevin Kelly

34. “Active mutators in placid times tend to die off. They are selected against. Reluctant mutators in quickly changing times are also selected against.”—Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan,Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

35. do things.

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

37. do what needs to be done.

38. A man approached JP Morgan, held up an envelope, and said, “Sir, in my hand I hold a guaranteed formula for success, which I will gladly sell you for $25,000.”“Sir,” JP Morgan replied, “I do not know what is in the envelope, however if you show me, and I like it, I give you my word as a gentleman that I will pay you what you ask.”The man agreed to the terms, and handed over the envelope. JP Morgan opened it, and extracted a single sheet of paper. He gave it one look, a mere glance, then handed the piece of paper back to the gent.And paid him the agreed upon $25,000.

39. 1. Every morning, write a list of the things that need to be done that day.2.Do them.Source: Hugh MacLeod/tompeters.com/NPR

40. try things.

41. “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#5.By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10.It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how toplan—for months.”—Bloomberg by Bloomberg

42. Hizzonor and the Governator*:“The New ActionHeroes”(Time/07.23.07)*Bloomberg, Schwarzenegger

43. drill.

44. “This is so simple it sounds stupid, but it is amazing how few oil people really understand that you only find oil if you drill wells.You may think you’re finding it when you’re drawing maps and studying logs, but you have to drill.” Source: The Hunters, by John Masters, Canadian O & G wildcatter

45. Build.

46. Dick (“Just build the damn thing.”)vs. Dan (“Don’t you know the difference between ‘tangible’ and ‘palpable’?”)

47. grind.

48. “Experiment fearlessly”Source: BW0821.06, Type A Organization Strategies/ “How to Hit a Moving Target”—Tactic #1

49. "I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly.”—Andy Grove

50. “We ground up more pig brains!”/ “We did more procedures”