Re-Imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age

1. Tom Peters’ Re-Imagine!Business Excellence in a Disruptive AgeEdinburgh/21April2004

2. “In Tom’s world, it’s always better to try a swan dive and deliver a colossal belly flop than to step timidly off the board while holding your nose.”—Fast Company /October2003

3. Slides at …tompeters.com

4. I. NEW BUSINESS. NEW CONTEXT.

5. “Uncertainty is the only thing to be sure of.”—Anthony Muh,head of investment in Asia, Citigroup Asset Management“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”—General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U. S. Army

6. All Bets Are Off.

7. Jobs TechnologyGlobalization War, Warfighting & Security

8. JobsNew TechnologyGlobalizationSecurity

9. “14MILLION service jobs are in danger of being shipped overseas”—The Dobbs Report/USN&WR/11.03/re new UCB study

10. “Income Confers No Immunity as Jobs Migrate”—Headline/USA Today/02.04

11. “One Singaporean workercosts as much as …3 … in Malaysia 8 … in Thailand 13 … in China 18 … in India.”Source: The Straits Times/08.18.03

12. “Thaksinomics” (after Taksin Shinawatra, PM)/ “Bangkok Fashion City”/ “managed asset reflation” (add to brand value of Thai textiles by demonstrating flair and design excellence)Source: The Straits Times/03.04.2004

13. “The proper role of a healthily functioning economy is to destroy jobs and to put labor to use elsewhere. Despite this truth, layoffs and firings will always sting, as if the invisible hand of free enterprise has slapped workers in the face.” —Joseph Schumpeter

14. “There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.”—Carly Fiorina/ HP/ 01.08.2004

15. In Store: International Equality, Intranational Inequality“The new organization of society implied by the triumph of individual autonomy and the true equalization of opportunity based upon merit will lead to very great rewards for merit and great individual autonomy. This will leave individuals far more responsible for themselves than they have been accustomed to being during the industrial period. It will also reduce the unearned advantage in living standards that has been enjoyed by residents of advanced industrial societies throughout the 20th century.”James Davidson & William Rees-Mogg,The Sovereign Individual

16. “WHAT ARE PEOPLE GOING TO DO WITH THEMSELVES?”—Headline/ Fortune/ 11.03 (“We should finally admit that we do not and cannot know, and regard that fact with serenity rather than anxiety.”)

17. JobsTechnologyGlobalizationSecurity

18. <1000A.D.: paradigm shift: 1000s of years1000: 100 years for paradigm shift1800s: > prior 900 years1900s: 1st 20 years > 1800s2000: 10 years for paradigm shift21st century: 1000Xtech change than 20th century (“the ‘Singularity,’ a merger between humans and computers that is so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history”)Ray Kurzweil

19. “I genuinely believe we are living through the greatest intellectual moment in history.”Matt Ridley, Genome

20. “A California biotechnology company has put the entire sequence of the human genome on a single chip, allowing researchers to conduct a single experiment on the complex relationships between the 30,000 genes that make up a human being.”—Page 3, Financial Times/10.03.2003

21. Sequenom/David Ewing Duncan/Wired11.02“Sequenom has industrialized the SNP [single nucleotide polymorphisms] identification process. …This, I’m told, is the first time a healthy human has ever been screened for the full gamut of genetic-disease markers. … On the horizon: multi-disease gene kits, available at Wal*Mart, as easy to use as home-pregnancy tests.”

22. JobsTechnologyGlobalization Security

23. “Asia’s rise is the economic event of our age. Should it proceed as it has over the last few decades, it will bring the two centuries of global domination by Europe and, subsequently, its giant North American offshoot to an end.” —Financial Times (09.22.2003)

24. “The world has arrived at a rare strategic inflection point where nearly half its population—living in China, India and Russia—have been integrated into the global market economy, many of them highly educated workers, who can do just about any job in the world. We’re talking about three billion people.”—Craig Barrett/Intel/01.08.2004

25. China Roars!

26. 1990-2003: Exports 8X ($380B); 6% global exports 2003 vs. 3.9% 2000; 16% of Total Global Growth in 2002.Source: “China Takes Off”, David Hale & Lyric Hughes Hale/Foreign Affairs/Nov-Dec2003

27. 1998-2003: 45,000,000 layoffs in state sector; offset by $450B in foreign investment; foreign companies account for 50+% of exports vs. 31% in Mexico, 15% in Korea.Source: “China Takes Off”, David Hale & Lyric Hughes Hale/Foreign Affairs/Nov-Dec2003

28. 50% of output from private firms, 37% from state-owned firms; 80% of workforce (incl. rural) now in private employ.Source: “China Takes Off”, David Hale & Lyric Hughes Hale/Foreign Affairs/Nov-Dec2003

29. Population growth = 1%; two-thirds of housing privately owned, 90% of urban Chinese own a home (vs. 61% in Japan)Source: “China Takes Off”, David Hale & Lyric Hughes Hale/Foreign Affairs/Nov-Dec2003

30. 200 cities with >1,000,000 population.Source: “China Takes Off”, David Hale & Lyric Hughes Hale/Foreign Affairs/Nov-Dec2003

31. 2003: China-Hong Kong leading producer in 8 of 12 key consumer electronic product areas (>50%: DVDs, digital cameras; >33.33%: DVD-ROM drives, personal desktop and notebook computers; >25% mobile phones, color TVs, PDAs, car stereos).Source: “China Takes Off”, David Hale & Lyric Hughes Hale/Foreign Affairs/Nov-Dec2003

32. “Going Global: Flush with billions in foreign reserves, China is embarking on a buying spree”—Cover/ Newsweek/ 03.01.04/ on China’s aggressive offshore acquisition activity (buying brands, technology, etc.)

33. World economic output: U.S.A., 21%; EU, 16%; China, 13% (2X since1991)Source: New York Times/12.14.2003

34. “With a Small Car, India Takes Big Step Onto Global Stage”—Headline, p. 1, WSJ, 02.05.2004

35. Indian GDP/1990-2002: Ag, 34% to 21%; services, 40% to 56%Source: The Economist/02.04

36. Level 5 (top) ranking/Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute: 35 of 70 companies in world are from IndiaSource: Wired/02.04

37. “Forget India, Let’s Go to Bulgaria”—Headline, BW/03.04, re SAP, BMW, Siemens et al. “near-shoring”

38. “CLONING COLLEGE: South Korea’s biomedical researchers, unhampered by politics, do world-class research on the cheap”—Headline, Newsweek/03.01.04

39. JobsTechnologyGlobalizationSecurity

40. “This is a dangerous world and it is going to become more dangerous.”“We may not be interested in chaos but chaos is interested in us.”Source: Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century

41. “The world’s new dimension (computers, Internet, globalization, instantaneous communication, widely available instruments of mass destruction and so on) amounts to a new metaphysics that, by empowering individual zealots or agitated tribes with unappeasable grievances, makes the world unstable and dangerous in radically new ways.” —Lance Morrow/Evil

42. All Bets Are Off!

43. “There will be more confusion in the business world in the next decadethan in any decade in history. And the current pace of change will only accelerate.”Steve Case

44. “We are in abrawl with no rules.”Paul Allaire

45. S.A.V.

46. “Strategy meetings held once or twice a year” to “Strategy meetings needed several times a week”Source: New York Times on Meg Whitman/eBay

47. “How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery and competition? Do we value stability and control? Or evolution and learning? Do we think that progress requires a central blueprint? Or do we see it as a decentralized, evolutionary process? Do we see mistakes as permanent disasters? Or the correctable byproducts of experimentation? Do we crave predictability? Or relish surprise? These two poles, stasis and dynamism, increasingly define our political, intellectual and cultural landscape.” —Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies

48. Successful Businesses’ Dozen Truths: TP’s 30-Year Perspective1. Insanely Great & Quirky Talent.2. Disrespect for Tradition.3. Totally Passionate (to the Point of Irrationality) Belief in What We Are Here to Do.4. Utter Disbelief at the Bullshit that Marks “Normal Industry Behavior.”5. A Maniacal Bias for Execution … and Utter Contempt for Those Who Don’t “Get It.”6. Speed Demons.7. Up or Out. (Meritocracy Is Thy Name. Sycophancy Is Thy Scourge.)8. Passionate Hatred of Bureaucracy.9. Willingness to Lead the Customer … and Take the Heat Associated Therewith. (Mantra: Satan Invented Focus Groups to Derail True Believers.)10. “Reward Excellent Failures. Punish Mediocre Successes.” 11. Courage to Stand Alone on One’s Record of Accomplishment Against All the Forces of Conventional Wisdom.12. A Crystal Clear Understanding of Brand Power.

49. It is the foremost task—and responsibility—of our generation to re-imagine our enterprises, private and public.—from the Foreword, Re-imagine

50. “Let’s compete—by training the best workers, investing in R & D, erecting the best infrastructure and building an education system that graduates students who rank with the worlds best. Our goal is to be competitive with the best so we both win and create jobs.” —Craig Barrett (Time/03.01.04)