Slides at … tompeters

1. Tom Peters’ Re-Imagine!Business Excellence in a Disruptive AgeBenfield/Manchester VT/05.26.2004

2. Slides at …tompeters.com

3. “What is it that distinguishes the thousands of years of history from what we think of as modern times? The answer goes way beyond the progress of science, technology, capitalism and democracy. … The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature. [ Thinkers like Luca Paccioli, Jacob Bernoulli and Abraham de Moivre] converted risk-taking into one of the prime catalysts that drives modern Western society … and converted the future from an enemy into an opportunity.”—Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

4. “We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”—from William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

5. “Al-Qaeda Said to have 18,000 Militants for Raids”Source: AP/05.25.2004/from International Institute for Strategic Studies annual survey of world affairs

6. “Terrorists Planning Summer Attack?”—AP Headline/05.25.04

7. “Unless nimble and sophisticated risk management systems are in place, the firm will be unable to benefit from revenue growth.”“There is a hell of a paradox. We try to model risk scenarios but end up instead increasing the complexity of the business to the point where it is almost unmanageable.”Source: IBM Business Consulting Services/The Global CEO Study 2004

8. All Bets Are Off.

9. “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

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

11. Perfect StormJobs TechnologyGlobalization War, Warfighting & Security

12. JobsNew TechnologyGlobalization War, Warfighting & Security

13. “14MILLION service jobs are in danger of being shipped overseas”—The Dobbs Report/USN&WR/11.03/re new UCB study

14. “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

15. E.g. …Jeff Immelt: 75% of “admin, back room, finance” “digitalized” in 3 years.Source: BW (01.28.02)

16. JobsTechnologyGlobalization War, Warfighting & Security

17. <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

18. JobsTechnologyGlobalization War, Warfighting & Security

19. “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

20. “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)

21. JobsTechnologyGlobalizationWar, Warfighting & Security

22. “We are at a pivotal point in history. … We are at one of a half dozen turning points that have fundamentally changed the way societies are organized for governance.”—Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History

23. “What happened after 1945 was not so much a radically new system as the concentration and culmination of the old one.” —Robert Cooper, on the Cold War, from The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century

24. “What has been emerging into the daylight since 1989 is not a rearrangement of the old system but a new system. Behind this lies a new form of statehood, or at least states that are behaving in a radically different way from the past.”—Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century

25. “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

26. “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

27. “The new century risks being overrun by both anarchy and technology. The two great destroyers of history may reinforce each other. Both the spread of terrorism and that of weapons of mass destruction point to a world in which Western governments are losing control. The spread of the technology of mass destruction represents a potentially massive redistribution of power away from the advanced industrial (and democratic) states and toward smaller states that may be less stable and have less of a stake in an orderly world; or more dramatically still, it may represent a redistribution of power away from the state itself and towards individuals, that is to say terrorists or criminals. In the past to be damaging, an ideological movement had to be widespread to recruit enough support to take on authority. Henceforth, comparatively small groups will be able to do the sort of damage which before only state armies or major revolutionary movements could achieve. A few fanatics with a ‘dirty bomb’ or biological weapons will be able to cause death on a scale not previously envisaged. … Emancipation, diversity, global communication—all of the things that promise an age of riches and creativity—could also bring a nightmare in which states lose control of the means of violence and people lose control of their futures.” —Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century

28. “To fight terrorism with an army is like trying to shoot a cloud of mosquitoes with a machine gun.”—Review of Terror in the Name of God/NYT/11.2003

29. Boyd

30. OODA Loop/Boyd Cycle“Unraveling the competition”/ Quick Transients/ Quick Tempo (NOT JUST SPEED!)/ Agility/ “So quick it is disconcerting” (adversary over-reacts or under-reacts)/ “Winners used tactics that caused the enemy to unravel before the fight” (NEVER HEAD TO HEAD)BOYD: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Robert Coram)

31. Eric’s ArmyFlat.Fast.Agile.Adaptable.Light … But Lethal.Talent/ “I Am an Army of One.”Info-intense.Network-centric.

32. 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.

33. “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

34. “It’s no longer enough to be a ‘change agent.’ You must be a changeinsurgent—provoking, prodding, warning everyone in sight that complacency is death.” —Bob Reich

35. 2. The Destruction Imperative.

36. “It is generally much easier to kill an organization than change it substantially.” Kevin Kelly, Out of Control

37. “Wealth in this new regime flows directly from innovation, not optimization. That is, wealth is not gained by perfecting the known, but by imperfectly seizing the unknown.”Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy

38. Forbes100 from 1917 to 1987: 39 members of the Class of ’17 were alive in ’87; 18 in ’87 F100; 18 F100 “survivors” underperformed the market by 20%; just 2 (2%), GE & Kodak, outperformed the market 1917 to 1987.S&P 500 from 1957 to 1997: 74 members of the Class of ’57 were alive in ’97; 12 (2.4%) of 500 outperformed the market from 1957 to 1997.Source: Dick Foster & Sarah Kaplan, Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market

39. “Mr. Foster and his McKinsey colleagues collected detailed performance data stretching back 40 years for 1,000 U.S. companies. They found that none of the long-term survivors managed to outperform the market. Worse, the longer companies had been in the database, the worse they did.”—Financial Times/11.28.2002

40. “Good management was the most powerful reason [leading firms] failed to stay atop their industries.Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.”Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma

41. “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

42. Market Share, Anyone?— 240 industries; market-share leader is ROA leader 29% of the time — Profit/ROA leaders: “aggressively weed out customers who generate low returns”Source: Donald V. Potter, Wall Street Journal

43. “Acquisitions are about buying market share. Our challenge is to create markets. There is a big difference.” Peter Job, CEO, Reuters

44. Winning the Merger Game Is Possible--Lots of deals--Little deals--Friendly deals--Stay close to core competence--Strategy is easy to understandSource: “The Mega-merger Mouse Trap”/Wall Street Journal/02.17.2004/David Harding & Sam Rovit, Bain & Co./re Comcast-Disney

45. No Wiggle Room!“Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.” Nicholas Negroponte

46. “Beware of the tyranny of making Small Changes to Small Things. Rather, make Big Changes to Big Things.”—Roger Enrico, former Chairman, PepsiCo

47. Jim & Tom. Joined at the hip. Not.

48. Good to Great: Fannie Mae … Kroger … Walgreens … Philip Morris … Pitney Bowes … Abbott … Kimberly-Clark … Wells Fargo

49. Great Companies … SETTHEAGENDA. (Period.)

50. AGENDA SETTERS: “Set the Table”/ Pioneers/ Questors/ AdventurersUS Steel … Ford … Macy’s … Sears … Litton Industries … ITT …The Gap …Limited … Wal*Mart …P&G … 3M … Intel … IBM … Apple … Nokia … Cisco … Dell … MCI … Sun …Oracle … Microsoft … Enron … Schwab … GE … Southwest … Laker …People Express… Ogilvy … Chiat/Day … Virgin … eBay … Amazon … Sony … BMW … CNN …