Tom Peters on leading the 21st-century organization
The only thing on earth that never lies to you is your calendar. That’s why I’m a fanatic on the topic of time management. But when you use that term, people think, “Here’s an adult with a brain. And he’s teaching time management. Find something more important, please.” But something more important doesn’t exist.
Did you ever read Leadership the Hard Way, by Dov Frohman? The two things I remember from that book are, one, that 50 percent of your time should be unscheduled. And second—and I love that this is coming from an Israeli intelligence guy—that the secret to success is daydreaming.
.. I hate to ever defend lines and boxes. But I also don’t believe that hierarchy is dead. I flew 40 hours with Emirates Airline last week, and I want to think there were charts and boxes in the Emirates Airline operation, particularly in the Mechanics Department.
.. Somebody once asked me, “What is your number-one goal in life?” I said, “My number-one goal in life, at the age of 71, is to be able to walk past a mirror without barfing.”
.. People say that fame is important, but in the end it really isn’t. People say that wealth is important, but in the end it really isn’t. My ex-wife had a father who was in the tombstone business. I’ve seen a lot of tombstones. None of ’em have net worth on ’em. It’s the people you develop. That’s what you remember when you get to be my age.
I don’t have much patience with CEOs who don’t see it that way.
.. 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.
.. Change is also about giving reinforcement at precisely the right moment. I like to say that I never help anybody travel 95 yards down a field. I find people who are already on their opponent’s five-yard line, and at exactly the right moment I give ’em a very big, swift kick in the butt. And they fall over the goal line.
.. Now one answer to that, if you believe former US labor secretary Bob Reich, is to put more women in management. They know how to do a work-around. Men don’t know how to do work-arounds, because the only thing we understand is hierarchy. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but then again the neuroscientists tell us it’s not that big an exaggeration. The male response is, “I can’t do anything about it ’cause my boss is really against it.” And the female response, by and large, would be, “Well, I know Jane who knows Bob who knows Dick, and we can get this thing done.” They do it circuitously.