The Power of Execution: Lessons from Tom Peters and Conrad Hilton

1. LONG Tom Peters’ EXCELLENCE! Foodservice Equipment Distributors Association 31 March 2016/Tucson (Slides available at tompeters.com)

2. Conrad Hilton

3. CONRADHILTON, 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. You get ’em in the door with “location, location, location”—and gorgeous appointments. You keep ’em coming back*with the tucked in shower curtain.*Profit rarely/never comes from transaction #1; it is a byproduct of transaction #2, #3, #4 …

6. “EXECUTION ISSTRATEGY.”*—Fred Malek*XX/eXecution eXcellence

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

8. “Amateurs talk about strategy. Professionals talk about logistics.” —General Omar Bradley, commander of American troops/D-Day

9. +1/-1

10. S&P 500 +1/-1* *Every …2weeks! Source: Richard Foster (via Rita McGrath/HBR/12.26.13

11. “I am often asked by would-be entrepreneurs seeking escape from life within huge corporate structures, ‘How do I build a small firm for myself?’ The answer seems obvious …Source: Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics

12. “I am often asked by would-be entrepreneurs seeking escape from life within huge corporate structures, ‘How do I build a small firm for myself?’ The answer seems obvious:Buy a very largeone and just wait.”—Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics

13. “Mr. Foster and his McKinsey colleagues collected detailed performance data stretching back 40 years for1,000U.S. companies.They found thatNONEofthe long-term survivors managed to outperform the market. Worse, the longer companies had been in the database, the worse they did.” —Financial Times

14. “NOT A SINGLE COMPANY THAT QUALIFIED AS HAVING MADE A SUSTAINED TRANSFORMATION IGNITED ITS LEAP WITH A BIG ACQUISITION OR MERGER.Moreover, comparison companies—those that failed to make a leap or, if they did, failed to sustain it—often tried to make themselves great with a big acquisition or merger. They failed to grasp the simple truth that while you can buy your way to growth, you cannot buy your way to greatness.”—Jim Collins/Time

15. THE RED CARPET STORE (Joel Resnick/Flemington NJ)

16. *Basement Systems Inc. (Larry Janesky/Seymour CT)*Dry Basement Science (100,000++ copies!)*1990: $0; 2003: $13M; 2010:$80,000,000

17. The Magicians of Motueka (PLUS)! W.A. Coppins Ltd.* (Coppins Sea Anchors/ PSA/para sea anchors) *Textiles, 1898; thrive on “wicked problems” —e.g., U.S. Navy STLVAST (Small To Large Vehicle At Sea Transfer); custom fabric from W. Wiggins Ltd./Wellington (specialty nylon, “Dyneema,” from DSM/Netherlands)

18. THE DOCK DOCTORS Custom Products & Shoreline Solutions Every waterfront property is different, from the topography of the shoreline to exposure and water depths. Our custom products are designed and fabricated based on your specific property and recreational needs. Whether you are interested in a dock, stair system, hillside elevator, or boat lift, we will design, manufacture, and install a custom product to accommodate your desires for a perfect waterfront. We offer innovative solutions and the most diverse waterfront product line on the East Coast. Whether your project is unusual or traditional, our years of experience consulting, designing, and manufacturing commercial projects for a variety of entities such as municipalities, marina facilities, hydro plants, engineers, and land planners. Marinas, piers, stairs, shoreside platforms, and wetland and pedestrian walkway piers, are only some of the examples of commercial projects that we specialize in. Commercial Division

19. Retail Superstars: Inside the 25 Best Independent Stores in America—by George Whalin

20. JUNGLE JIM’S INTERNATIONAL MARKET, FAIRFIELD, OH:“An adventure in ‘shoppertainment,’ begins in the parking lot and goes on to 1,600 cheeses and 1,400 varieties of hot sauce—not to mention 12,000 wines priced from $8-$8,000 a bottle; all this is brought to you by 4,000 vendors. Customers from every corner of the globe.” BRONNER’S CHRISTMAS WONDERLAND, FRANKENMUTH, MI, POP 5,000:98,000-square-foot “shop” features 6,000 Christmas ornaments, 50,000trims, and anything else you can name pertaining to Christmas. …” Source: George Whalin, Retail Superstars: Inside the 25 Best Independent Stores in America

21. “BE THE BEST. IT’S THE ONLY MARKET THAT’S NOT CROWDED.” From: Retail Superstars: Inside the 25 Best Independent Stores in America, George Whalin

22. I love [that “L-word” again—what can I say?] …Middle-sized Niche- Micro-niche Dominators!* *"Own" a niche through EXCELLENCE/INNOVATION! (Writ large: Germany’s MITTELSTAND/See below)

23. Baader (Iceland/80% fish-processing systems) Gallagher (NZ/electric fences) W.E.T. (heated car seat tech) Gerriets (theater curtains and stage equipment) Electro-Nite (sensors for the steel industry) Essel Propack (India/tooth paste tubes) SGS (product auditing and certification) DELO (specialty adhesives) Amorim (Portugal/cork products) EOS (laser sintering) Beluga (heavy-lift shipping) Omicron (tunnel-grid microscopy) Universo (wristwatch hands) Dickson Constant (technical textiles) O.C. Tanner (employee recognition/$400M) Hoeganaes (powder metallurgy supplies) Hidden Champions* of the 21st Century: Success Secrets of Unknown World Market Leaders/Hermann Simon (*1, 2, or 3 in world market; <$4B; low public awareness)

24. Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed: THE THREE RULES: How Exceptional Companies Think*: 1. Better before cheaper. 2. Revenue before cost. 3. There are no other rules. (*From a database of over 25,000 companies from hundreds of industries covering 45 years, they uncovered 344 companies that qualified as statistically “exceptional.”) Jeff Colvin, Fortune: “The Economy Is Scary … But Smart Companies Can Dominate”: They manage for value—not for EPS. They get radically customer-centric. THEY KEEP DEVELOPING HUMAN CAPITAL.

25. The Future Is Small: Why AIM Will Be the World’s Best Market Beyond the Credit Boom—Gervais Williams, superstar fund manager (FT/1217.14: “Research shows that new and small companies create almost all the new private sector jobs and are disproportionately innovative.”)

26. “agile creatures darting between the legs of the multinational monsters” Source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek on the GermanMITTELSTAND

27. Tom Peters’ EXCELLENCE! Foodservice Equipment Distributors Association 31 March 2016/Tucson (Slides available at tompeters.com)

28. The 3-Minute Warning

29. “Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of … 3minutes. [Pilots] have become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.” Source: Nicholas Carr, “The Great Forgetting,” The Atlantic, 11.13

30. AlphaGo Beats Go Grandmaster/March 2016 “This technology is going to cut through the global economy like a hot knife through butter.  It learns fast and largely on its own.  It's widely applicable.  It doesn't only master what it has seen, it can innovate.  For example: some of the unheard of moves made by AlphaGo were considered ‘beautiful’ by the Grandmaster it beat. “Limited AGI/Artificial General Intelligence (deep learning in particular) will have the ability to do nearly any job currently being done by human beings—from lawyers to judges, nurses to doctors, driving to construction—potentially at a grandmaster's level of capability.  This makes it a buzzsaw. “Very few people—and I mean very few—will be able to stay ahead of the limited AGI buzzsaw.  It learns so quickly, the fate of people stranded in former factory towns gutted by ‘free trade’ is likely to be the fate of the highest paid technorati.  They simply don't have the capacity to learn fast enough or be creative enough to stay ahead of it.” —John Robb/Global Guerrillas 3/12/16

31. IoT/Internet of Things IoE/The Internet of Everything M2M/Machine-to-Machine Ubiquitous computing Embedded computing Pervasive computing Industrial Internet Etc.* ** *** **** ***** *“More Than 50 BILLION connected devices by 2020” —Ericsson **Estimated 212 BILLION connected devices by 2020—IDC ***Estimated IoT market size, next decade: $14.4 trillion **** “By 2025 IoT could be applicable to $82 trillion of output or approximately one half the global economy”—GE (GE is literally betting its existence and the future on the IoT, Bloomberg Businessweek, 03.2016) *****100,000,000,000,000 [100 trillion] sensors/2030 —Michael Patrick Lynch, The Internet of Us Primary source: “The Big Switch,” Capital Insights

32. Sensor Pills:“Proteus Digital Health is one of several pioneers in sensor-based health technology. They make a silicon chip the size of a grain of sand that is embedded into a safely digested pill that is swallowed. When the chip mixes with stomach acids, the processor is powered by the body’s electricity and transmits data to a patch worn on the skin. That patch, in turn, transmits data via Bluetooth to a mobile app, which then transmits the data to a central database where a health technician can verify if a patient has taken her or his medications. “This is a bigger deal than it may seem. In 2012, it was estimated that people not taking their prescribed medications cost $258 BILLION in emergency room visits, hospitalization, and doctor visits. An average of 130,000 Americans die each year because they don’t follow their prescription regimens closely enough…” (The FDA approved placebo testing in April 2012; sensor pills are ticketed to come to market in 2015 or 2016.) Source: Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy

33. “Meet Your Next Surgeon: Dr. Robot” Source: Feature/Fortune/15 JAN 2013/on Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci/multiple bypass heart-surgery robot

34. “[Michael Vassar/MetaMed founder] is creating a better information system and new class of people to manage it. ‘Almost all health care people get is going to be done—hopefully—by algorithms within a decade or two. We used to rely on doctors to be experts, and we’ve crowded them into being something like factory workers, where their job is to see one patient every 8 to 11 minutes and implement a by-the-book solution. I’m talking about creating a new ‘expert profession’—medical quants, almost like hedgefund managers, who could do the high-level analytical work of directing all the information that flows into the world’s hard drives. Doctors would now be aided by Vassar’s new information experts who would be aided by advanced artificial intelligence.”—New York /0624.13

35. Persado(vs. copywriter): emotion words, product characteristics, “call to action,” position of text, images Up To $250 To Spend On All Ships In All Destinations. 2 Days Left (1.3%) vs. No kidding! You Qualify to Experience An Incredible Vacation With Us :-) (4.1)“A creative person is good but random. We’ve taken the randomness out by building an ontology of language” —Lawrence Whittle, head of sales Source: Wall Street Journal/ 0825.14/ “It’s Finally Time to Take AI Seriously”

36. “Algorithms have already written symphonies as moving as those composed by Beethoven, picked through legalese with the deftness of a senior law partner, diagnosed patients with more accuracy than a doctor, written news articles with the smooth hand of a seasonedreporter, and driven vehicles on urban highways with far better control than a human driver.” —Christopher Steiner,Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule the World

37. “Software is eating the world.” —Marc Andreessen

38. “Human level capability has not turned out to be a special stopping point from an engineering perspective. ….” Source: Illah Reza Nourbakhsh, Professor of Robotics, Carnegie Mellon, Robot Futures

39. “If you think being a ‘professional’ makes your job safe, think again.” —Robert Reich

40. “Ten Million Jobs at Risk from Advancing Technology: Up to 35 percent of Britain's jobs will be eliminated by new computing and robotics technology over the next 20 years, say experts [Deloitte/Oxford University].” —Headline, Telegraph (UK), 11 November2014 “I believe that 90 percent of white-collar/‘knowledge-work’ jobs—which are 80 percent of all jobs—in the U.S. will be either destroyed or altered beyond recognition in the next 10 to 15 years.”—Tom Peters, Cover, Time, 22 May 2000 “The machine plays no favorites between manual and white collar labor.” —Norbert Wiener, 1958

41. The New Logic: Scale w/o EmploymentKodak: 1988/145,000 employees; 2012/bankruptInstagram: 30,000,000 customers/13 employees(WhatsApp: 450,000,000 customers/ 55 employees/Valued @ $19,000,000,000)Source: Robert Reich’s Blog/0317.15

42. “The median worker is losing the race against the machine.” * —Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race AGAINST the Machine *“Occupations intensive in tasks that can easily be computerized are usually in the middle class.” (MIT’s David Autor)

43. China/Foxconn: 1,000,000robots/next 3 years Source: Race AGAINST the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

44. “Since 1996, manufacturing employment in China itself has actuallyfallen by an estimated25 percent. That’s over30,000,000fewerChinese workers in that sector, even while output soared by 70 percent.It’s not that American workers are being replaced by Chinese workers. It’s that both American and Chinese workers are being made more efficient [replaced] by automation.” —Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

45. AI/Be Careful of What You Wish For Hawking* Gates** Musk Etc. * “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” ** “I don’t understand why people are NOT concerned.”

46. 20/5

47. Welcome to the Age of Social Media:“It takes 20years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.Also, the Internet and technology have made customers more demanding., and they expect information, answers, products, responses, and resolutions sooner than ASAP.” —John DiJulius, The Customer Service Revolution

48. “What used to be “word of mouth” is now “word of mouse.” You are either creating brand ambassadors or brand terrorists doing brand assassination.” —John DiJulius, The Customer Service Revolution: Overthrow Conventional Business, Inspire Employees, and Change the World

49. “Customer engagement is moving from relatively isolated market transactions to deeply connected and sustained social relationships.This basic change in how we do business will make an impact on just about everything we do.” Social Business By Design: Transformative Social Media Strategies For the Connected Company —Dion Hinchcliffe & Peter Kim

50. Welcome to the Age of Social Media:“The customer is in complete control of communication.” —John DiJulius, The Customer Service Revolution: Overthrow Conventional Business, Inspire Employees, and Change the World