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Explore leadership insights and business strategies from industry legends like Conrad Hilton, Jack Welch, and Larry Bossidy, emphasizing the importance of rigorous execution and servant leadership. Discover the key principles of excellence from the past and how they continue to shape successful organizations today. Gain valuable lessons on strategy implementation, employee empowerment, and customer-centric practices for sustainable growth. Uncover the hidden power of execution in driving business success and outperforming market expectations.
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LONG VERSION Tom Peters’ Excellence. (Or What?) Annual Managers Convention Tel Aviv/26 June 2012 (slides @ tompeters.com and excellencenow.com)
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 …
You get ’em in the door with “location, location, location.” You keep ’em coming backwith the tucked in shower curtain.**Profit rarely comes from transaction #1; it is a byproduct of transaction #2, #3, #4 …
“Costco figured out the big,simple things and executedwith total fanaticism.”—Charles Munger, Berkshire Hathaway
“In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. Pick a general direction … andimplementlikehell.”—Jack Welch
“Execution is thejobof the businessleader.”—Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/ Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
“Execution isasystematic processof rigorously discussing hows and whats, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability.”—Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/ Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
“When assessing candidates, the first thing I looked for was energy and enthusiasm for execution. Does she talk about the thrill of getting things done, the obstacles overcome, the role her people played—or does she keep wandering back to strategy or philosophy?”—Larry Bossidy, Execution
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
ExIn*: 1982-2002/Forbes.comDJIA: $10,000 yields $85,000EI: $10,000 yields $140,050* “Excellence Index”/Basket of 32 publicly traded stocks from the “excellent companies”/In Search of Excellence
I am often asked how the “Excellent companies” have fared. Some, to be sure, were bombs. But, on the 20th anniversary of the book’s publication, Forbes.com analyzed the stock market performance of the firms. The results, FYI, are on the prior slide. (In addition to the satisfactory performance, Forbes noted that, unlike the real world of stock-picker indices, this analysis precluded selling off stocks that were tanking—hence the Index is at a big disadvantage to standard indices; yet it had still done very well.) (For no particular reason, neither I nor anyone else seems to have done a subsequent analysis. Personally, I’m not keen, as a matter of ingrained habit, about dwelling on the past.)
Organizations exist to serve. Period. Leaders live to serve. Period.
“I start with the premise that the function of leadership is toproducemore leaders,not more followers.”—Ralph Nader
Hard is Soft. Soft is Hard.
People. Customers. Values. Some—most?—call these ideas “soft”—where are the numbers and the plans? Surely there is room for the numbers. But they are the real “soft stuff”—malleable and manipulable. (As we’ve seen again and again during the current economic crisis.) The truly “hard stuff”—which can’t be faked or exaggerated—are the relationships with, for instance, our customers and our own people. “‘Hard’ is ‘soft.’ ‘Soft’ is ‘hard.’” Mantra #1 from In Search of EXCELLENCE.
“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
“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 large one and just wait.”—Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics
“Mr. Foster and his McKinsey colleagues collected detailed performance data stretching back 40 years for 1,000 U.S. companies.They found thatnoneof the long-term survivors managed to outperform the market. Worse, the longer companies had been in the database, the worse they did.”—Financial Times
“Data drawn from the real world attest to a fact that is beyond our control:Everything in existence tends to deteriorate.”—Norberto Odebrecht, Education Through Work
“When asked to name just one big merger that had lived up to expectations, Leon Cooperman, former cochairman of Goldman Sachs’ Investment Policy Committee, answered:I’m sure there are success stories out there, but at this moment I draw a blank.”—Mark Sirower, The Synergy Trap
“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
MittELstand* ** *“agile creatures darting between the legs of the multinational monsters”(Bloomberg BusinessWeek) **E.g. Goldmann Produktion
The long-term strength of the German economy can be captured in one word, and that word is not BASF. Try … Mittelstand. That is, Germany’s middle-sized, often high-tech firms that tend to dominate this or that well-defined global market niche. My simple point here is that you can have a dominant economy that is not led by or overly dependent upon enormous firms. (I am one of the very few Americans to have extensively studied the Mittelstand—Mittlestand companies were a principal feature of my 1992 book, Liberation Management. Typical was Goldmann Produktion, a truly teensy tiny chemical company, with a cast of a couple of dozen, that dominated a truly tiny global niche associated with candle coloring.)
“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
Jungle Jim’s International Market, Fairfield, Ohio: “An adventure in ‘shoppertainment,’as Jungle Jim’s calls it, begins in the parking lot and goes on to 1,600 cheeses and, yes, 1,400 varieties of hot sauce —not to mention 12,000 wines priced from $8 to $8,000 a bottle; all this is brought to you by 4,000 vendors. Customers come from every corner of the globe.” Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland, Frankenmuth, Michigan, pop 5,000:98,000-square-foot “shop” features the likes of 6,000 Christmas ornaments, 50,000 trims, and anything else you can name if it pertains to Christmas. Source: George Whalin, Retail Superstars
Retail Superstars: Inside the 25 Best Independent Stores in America—by George Whalin
Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big
Small Giants: Companies that Chose to Be Great Instead of Big (Bo Burlingham) “They cultivated exceptionally intimate relationships with customers and suppliers, based on personal contact, one-on-one interaction, and mutual commitment to delivering on promises. “Each company had an extraordinarily intimate relationship with the local city, town, or countyin which it did business —a relationship that went well beyond the usual concept of `giving back.’ “The companies had what struck me asunusually intimate workplaces. “I noticed thepassionthat the leaders brought to what the company did.They loved the subject matter, whether it be music, safety lighting, food, special effects, constant torque hinges, beer, records storage, construction, dining, or fashion.”
Whoever Tries The Most Stuff Wins
Whoever Tries The Most Things The Fastest Wins
READY.FIRE.AIM.H. Ross Perot (vs “Aim! Aim! Aim!”/EDS vs GM/1985)
H. Ross Perot sold EDS to GM in the 1980s, and went on the car giant’s Board. A few years later he was asked to explain the difference between the two companies. He said that at EDS the strategy was “Ready. Fire. Aim.” I.e., get on with it—now. At GM the “strategy” was “Ready. Aim. Aim. Aim. Aim. …” (Alas, well into the 1st decade of the new century GM’s problems/unwieldy bureaucracy remained pretty much unchanged.)
“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
“Burt Rutan wasn’t a fighter jock; he was an engineer who had been asked to figure out why the F-4 Phantom was flying pilots into the ground in Vietnam. While his fellow engineers attacked such tasks with calculators, Rutan insisted on considering the problem in the air. A near-fatal flight not only led to a critical F-4 modification, it also confirmed for Rutan a notion he had held ever since he had built model airplanes as a child.The way to make a better aircraft wasn’t to sit around perfecting a design, it was to get something up in the air and see what happens, then try to fix whatever goes wrong.”—Eric Abrahamson & David Freedman, Chapter 8, “Messy Leadership,”from A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder
Culture of Prototyping“Effective prototyping may be themost valuablecore competence an innovative organization can hope to have.”—Michael Schrage
Think about It!?Innovation = Reaction to the PrototypeSource: Michael Schrage
“Demo or die!” Source: This was the approach championed by NicholasNegroponte which vaulted his MITMediaLab to the forefront of IT-multimedia innovation. It was his successful alternative to the traditional MIT-academic “publish or perish.” Negroponte’s rapid-prototyping version was emblematic of the times and the pace and the enormity of the opportunity. (NYTimes/0426.11)
