Tom Peters’ EXCELLENCE: 31 Numbers 15 October 2013

1. Tom Peters’ EXCELLENCE: 31 Numbers 15 October 2013

2. The whole story? Far from it! Nonetheless, herewith a small selection of NUMBERS from my MASTER presentation. Actually, they tell a lot of the story.

3. 1,000,000

4. China, the “low wage nation”? Yet: ONE Chinese company—China’s Foxconn—will implant 1,000,000 robots in just the next three years.

5. +26/0

6. What about the people part of the equation? Post-Great Recession: Equipment Expenditures +26%; payrolls 0%

7. 500:1

8. Portent of things to come? Algorithms are now encroaching on high-wage jobs: Legal industry/ Pattern Recognition/Discovery. Use of eDiscovery algorithms translates into a need for 500 lawyers being reduced a need for … ONE. Source: Race AGAINST the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

9. 2,700

10. “Gamification” of everything is touted by some: “Gamification presents the best tools humanity has ever had to create and sustain engagement in people.” —Gabe Zichermann & Joselin Linder, Gamification: How Leaders Leverage Game Mechanics to Crush the Competition But “gamification” is not easy. This is what it means in game-world: “You get a sense of the scale and intricacy of the task by considering the sound effects alone: The game contains 54,000 pieces of audio and 40,000 lines of dialogue. There are2,700 different noises for footsteps alone depending on whose foot is stepping on what.”—Sam Leithon Halo 3, from Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

11. 25

12. MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around, Big Time: “I’m always stopping by our stores— at least25a 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 Schultz

13. 3K/5M

14. More MBWA: Peerless sports agent Mark McCormack said it’s not-infrequently essential to travel 3,000 miles for a 5 minute meeting.

15. 50

16. “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 as 50percent—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 —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”)

17. 4

18. Not an exaggeration: The 4 most important words in any organization are … “WHAT DO YOU THINK?” —Dave Wheeler,

19. 8

20. Change the World With 8 Words:“What do you think?”“How can I help?”

21. 12

22. Change the World With 12 Words: “What do you think?”“How can I help?” “What have you learned?”

23. 7/38/55

24. Albert Mehrabian’s [directional] “7-38-55 Rule” Your words: 7% Your tone of voice: 38% Your body language: 55% 7% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in the words that are spoken. 38% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is paralinguistic (the way that the words are said). 55% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in facial expression.

25. 5/136

26. “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.” —Paul Meehl, Clinical versus Statistical Prediction

27. 18

28. Listening skills? The best information concerning a patient’s malady is … the patient says Dr. Jerome Groopman in How Doctors Think. Yet research shows that the average doctor interrupts the patient after: 18 … SECONDS.

29. 0/15

30. Press Ganey Associates study of 139,380 patients from 225 hospitals: 0 of the top 15 factors determining Patient Satisfaction referred to patient’s health outcome.Instead: Satisfaction is directly related to Staff Interaction; directly correlated with Employee Satisfaction Source: Putting Patients First, Susan Frampton, Laura Gilpin, Patrick Charmel

31. 53 = 53

32. There are 53 players on the active roster of a professional foot ball team in the U.S. Needless to say, each one has a different role. Coaches and their general managers spend countless (literally) hours evaluating those players in terms of there immediate and longterm usefulness. Message:53 = 53. Each player is different and perceived so. My “bottom line”: What holds for a professional football team holds for the “players” in any and every organization. Standardized evaluations are an abomination.

33. #1

34. That paragon of excellent management, GE, says that skills at evaluating people is its #1 differentiator. This from the mouth of Jack Welch and his successor, Jeff Immelt.

35. #1

36. I contend that the #1 problem in almost every organization is failures of XF/cross-functional co-ordination. Pursuing “XFX”/cross-functional eXcellence thence becomes the #1 enterprise opportunity. The pursuit of XFX requires conscious and visible management each and every day.

37. 70

38. Hiring is hardly “overlooked,” but is rarely taken anywhere nearly as seriously as it ought to be: “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

39. 270/<10

40. I often believe that CEOs see big spending on, say, IT as a “crucial strategic investment.” And see training, by contrast, as a “necessary evil.” To my mind, that’s ass backwards. Training is our most important investment—and the CTO/Chief Training Officer ought to sit next to the, say, CFO on the executive floor. That’s obviously the story for the military, sports, and the arts to name a few.The Container Store, invariably in the Top 10 “best companies to work for in the USA,” believes. The average retail employee gets 16 hours of training The # at the Container Store: 270 hours. Among other things, employee turnover is <10% versus a retail average of >100%.

41. >2X/28T

42. W > 2X (C + I)* • *“Women now drive the global economy. Globally, they control about $20 trillion in consumer spending, and that figure could climb as high as $28 trillion in the next five years. Their $13 trillion in total yearly earnings could reach $18 trillion in the same period. In aggregate, women represent a growth market bigger than China and India combined—more than twice as big in fact. Given those numbers, it would be foolish to ignore or underestimate the female consumer. And yet many companies do just that—even ones that are confidant that they have a winning strategy when it comes to women. Consider Dell’s …” • Source: Michael Silverstein and Kate Sayre, “The Female Economy,” HBR, 09.09

43. 2.6/21

44. At a Manhattan event, I got into conversation with a very successful financial planner. He told me that, having sensed an enormous opportunity, he had re-oriented his practice in directions consistent with an assessment of the attributes women sought in a financial advisor. He offered this startling (and powerful) observation: “The ‘relationships’ orientation among women, Tom, is very real. For instance, my male clients on average recommend me to 2.6 others. The comparable number of recommendations by my women clients is 21!” 2.6. 21. Wow!

45. 80

46. “Headline 2020:Women Hold 80 Percent of Management and Professional Jobs”Source: The Extreme Future: The Top Trends That Will Reshape the World in the Next 20 Years, James Canton

47. 30

48. “Social Business” MillerCoors: Gender imbalance. Women of Sales peer support. Private network, Attrition plummeted. Teva Canada: Supply chain excellence achieved. Share-Point/troubleshooting/Strategy-Nets/hooked to other functions; Moxie social tools, document editing, etc. IBM: Social business tools/ 30% drop in project completion time/300K on LinkedIn, 200K on Facebook. Bloomberg: Mobi social media analytics prelude to stock performance. Intuit: struggling against H&R Block temp staffing/customers #1 asset/Live Community, focused on help with transactions (not general, embedded in TurboTax). Social Business By Design: Transformative Social Media Strategies For the Connected Company —Dion Hinchcliffe & Peter Kim

49. 1/47

50. No Kidding: There is only1 thing I’ve come to believe “for sure” in the 47 years between my first “real job” (as a junior officer in a Seabee battalion in Vietnam) and today. Sometimes I call it WTTMSW: Whoever Tries The Most Stuff Wins. That is, life to a large extent is a numbers came and a hustler’s game. Try more stuff. Try it fast. And perhaps the world will become your oyster. Actually, my favorite formulation comes not from myself, but from iconoclastic EDS founder Ross Perot: RFA. Or: Ready. Fire. Aim. Ross sold EDS to GM, went on the Board, and was ultimately frustrated. He put it this way: “The first EDSer to see a snake kills it. At GM, the first thing you do is organize a committee on snakes. Then you bring in a consultant who knows a lot about snakes. Third thing you do is talk about it for a year.” Amen.