REALLY First Things Before First Things Tom Peters/16 October 2013

1. REALLY First Things Before First Things Tom Peters/16 October 2013

2. REALLY First Things Before First Things: Conrad Hilton

3. CONRAD HILTON, at a gala celebrating his career, was called to the podium and asked,“What were the most important lessons you learned in your long and distinguished career?”His answer …

4. “Remember to tuck the shower curtain inside the bathtub.”

5. “EXECUTION ISSTRATEGY.”—Fred Malek

6. REALLY First Things Before First Things: The Army Knows!

7. If the regimental commander lost most of his 2nd lieutenants and 1st lieutenants and captains and majors, it would be a tragedy. If he lost his sergeants it would be a catastrophe. The Army and the Navy are fully aware that success on the battlefield is dependent to an extraordinary degree on its Sergeants and Chief Petty Officers. Does industry have the same awareness?

8. “People leave managers not companies.”—Dave Wheeler

9. REALLY First Things Before First Things: “C-level”?!

10. In the Army, 3-star generals worry about training. In most businesses, it's a “ho hum” mid-level staff function.

11. I would hazard a guess that most CEOs see IT investments as a “strategic necessity,” but see training expenses as “a necessary evil.”

12. REALLY First Things Before First Things:53 = 53

13. People are NOT“Standardized.” Their evaluations should NOTbe standardized. EVER.

14. REALLY First Things Before First Things: Strengths > Weaknesses

15. “A man should never be promoted to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknessesrather than on their strengths.”—Peter Drucker,The Practice of Management

16. EVALUATING PEOPLE = #1 DIFFERENTIATORSource: Jack Welch/Jeff Immelt on GE’s #1 strategic skill (!!!!)

17. REALLY First Things Before First Things: Self-evaluation

18. “Being aware of yourself and how you affect everyone around you is what distinguishes a superior leader.”—Edie Seashore (strategy + business #45)

19. “How can a high-level leader like _____ be so out of touch with the truth about himself? It’s more common than you would imagine. In fact, the higher up the ladder a leader climbs, the less accurate his self-assessment is likely to be. The problem is an acute lack of feedback [especially on people issues].”—Daniel Goleman (et al.), The New Leaders

20. "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." — Leo Tolstoy

21. REALLY First Things Before First Things: Hiring

22. “Development can help great people be even BETTER—BUT IF I HAD A DOLLAR TO SPEND, I’D SPEND 70 CENTS GETTING THE RIGHT PERSON IN THE DOOR.”—Paul Russell, Director, Leadership and Development, Google

23. REALLY First Things Before First Things: Questionable Judgment Skills

24. Clinical versus Statistical Prediction“There is now [1996] a meta-analysis of studies of the comparative efficacy of clinical judgment and actuarial prediction methods. … Of 136 research studies from a wide variety of predictive domains, not more than 5 percent show the clinician’s predictive procedure to be more accurate than a statistical one.”Source: Paul Meehl, Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, quoted in Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

25. REALLY First Things Before First Things: #1 Failing

26. “If I had to pick one failing of CEOs, it’s that they don’t read enough.”—Co-founder of one of the largest investment services firms in the USA/world

27. REALLY First Things Before First Things: #1

29. REALLY First Things Before First Things:We Are What We Eat: The “Fred Smith Question”

30. “Who’s the most interesting person you’ve met in the last 90 days? How do I get in touch with them?”—Fred Smith

31. REALLY First Things Before First Things: XFX =#1

32. XFX = #1* *Cross-Functional eXcellence

33. NEVER WASTE A LUNCH!

34. % XF lunches* *Measure! Monthly! Part of evaluation! [The PAs Club.]

35. “Allied commands depend on mutual confidence and this confidence is gained, above all through thedevelopment offriendships.” —General D.D. Eisenhower, Armchair General* *“Perhaps his most outstanding ability [at West Point] was the ease with which he made friends and earned the trust of fellow cadets who came from widely varied backgrounds; it was a quality that would pay great dividends during his future coalition command.”

36. REALLY First Things Before First Things: “We”

37. 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

38. “I am hundreds of times better here[than in my prior hospital assignment] because of the support system. It’s like you were working in an organism; you are not a single cell when you are out there practicing.’”—quote from Dr. Nina Schwenk, in Chapter 3, “Practicing Team Medicine,” from Leonard Berry & Kent Seltman, from Management Lessons From Mayo Clinic

39. Every week every swimmer reports on how he helped a teammate Source: Skip Kenney, Stanford men’s swimming coach, 31 consecutive PAC10 championships, 7 NCAA championships

40. REALLY First Things Before First Things: Meeting Power!

41. Meetings = #1 leadership opportunity

42. Meetings are #1 thing bosses do. Therefore, 100% of those meetings:EXCELLENCE. ENTHUSIASM. ENGAGEMENT. LEARNING. TEMPO. WORK-OF-ART. DAMN IT.

43. REALLY First Things Before First Things: MBWA

44. 25

45. “I’m always stopping by our stores— at least 25a week. I’m also in other places: Home Depot, Whole Foods, Crate & Barrel. I try to be a sponge to pick up as much as I can.”—Howard SchultzSource: Fortune, “Secrets of Greatness”

46. 3K/5MSource: Mark McCormack

47. “Most managers spend a great deal of time thinking about what they plan to do, but relatively little time thinking about what they plan not to do. As a result, they become so caught up … in fighting the fires of the moment that they cannot really attend to the long-term threats and risks facing the organization. So the first soft skill of leadership the hard way is to cultivate the perspective of Marcus Aurelius: avoid busyness, free up your time, stay focused on what really matters.Let me put it bluntly: every leader should routinely keep a substantial portion of his or her time—I would say as much as50percent—unscheduled.… Only when you have substantial ‘slop’ in your schedule—unscheduled time—will you have the space to reflect on what you are doing, learn from experience, and recover from your inevitable mistakes. Leaders without such free time end up tackling issues only when there is an immediate or visible problem. Managers’ typical response to my argument about free time is, ‘That’s all well and good, but there are things I have to do.’Yet we waste so much time in unproductive activity—it takes an enormous effort on the part of the leader to keep free time for the truly important things.”—Dov Frohman (& Robert Howard), Leadership The Hard Way: Why Leadership Can’t Be Taught—And How You Can Learn It Anyway (Chapter 5, “The Soft Skills Of Hard Leadership”)

48. REALLY First Things Before First Things: ONE at a Time

49. “If there is any one ‘secret’ to effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first … and they do one thing at a time.”—Peter Drucker

50. REALLY First Things Before First Things: Acknowledgement!