Top 5 Signs Your Organization Has Been Influenced by Tom Peters

 

Tom Peters published In Search of Excellence (Harper Collins, 1982) with Robert Waterman, and it led to a sharp correction in the way many executives viewed their organizations and their places in it. The problems with Mr. Peters’ scholarship, in my opinion, are varied, but certainly the most irksome element of them is that they are conveyed with such certainty that many managers will embrace them without a sense of proportion or perspective, and then attempt immediate implementation. Peters was right when he challenged the notions of the asset managers, that the point of all management is to “maximize shareholder wealth.” And I must admit a certain level of glee over watching him address an auditorium full of Sloan School MBAs, and essentially mocking them to their faces over what they had paid thousands and thousands of dollars to learn.

But the reality of Peters’ work is that it is often lacking in conveying a sense of perspective or proportion. He advocates, for example, much greater emphasis on customer satisfaction, but offers absolutely no upper boundary as to when the organization might want to ease off on such an emphasis. He simply loves the idea of empowering the rank-and-file, but, again, offers no evaluation method for testing when this empowerment might have gone too far. He presents as if his scholarship was predicated on an even-handed, honest attempt at identifying high-performing organizations and learning their secrets to success, but, later, in an interview with Fast Company magazine entitled “Tom Peters’ True Confessions,” asserted that the process for identifying the organizations profiled in In Search of Excellence was far less ordered than presented.

But the damage has been done. In Search of Excellence, and his books that followed it, have sold millions of copies, mostly, I would imagine, to managers desperate to improve their skills and the organizations for which they are responsible. How do you know if your organization is headed by such a manager? Well, here are some tell-tale signs:

1.      The people in your organization who interact with your customers on a day-to-day basis are trying to give away all of your assets. Peters stresses over and over the need to abandon the previous, moribund notions of generating profit, and embrace the need to satisfy your customers at all costs, and I do mean at all costs. So, if your staff is caving in to any and all customer requirements, no matter how outlandish or outrageous, you might be in a Peters-influenced organization.

2.      The so-called rank-and-file members of your organization are suddenly engaged in activities that are somewhat tangential to their original job duties. Did you, as an entrepreneur or manager, have a clear idea of the technical approach your team should take in tackling their day-to-day issues? Well, forget it. Any worker without the word “manager” in their job title must be assumed to have a better handle on the work than you do, so, in the name of superior management approaches, deal with it.

3.      Your accountants are visibly agitated on an ongoing basis. I actually believe that this is Tom Peters’ greatest contribution to management science, the pointing out and socializing the idea that there is much folly emanating from the asset managers’ playbook (though, to my knowledge, he never articulated it as such). As I have pointed out, both in this blog and in my second book, the flawed (if not utterly invalid) theories coming from eminent business school academicians are legion, but are not only accepted, they have many people paying a lot of money to learn them. When Tom Peters writes about companies making money hand-over-fist while maintaining business models very different from these conventional theories, he is actually doing the management science world a huge favor. But he’s also frustrating the stuffing out of those members of your staff steeped in this set of narratives, and chief among them are your accountants.

4.      The parts of your facilities that the customer never sees are showing signs of neglect. Since customer satisfaction trumps all other business considerations in Mr. Peters’ world, and there’s only so much budget to be spent on facility upkeep, we all know which parts are getting short-shrift here.

5.      Everybody’s suddenly on a first-name basis. This is also an area where I tend to agree with Mr. Peters, since the flattening of the organization does indeed enhance communications and information sharing, and information is the life-blood of any organization. However, if your candy-stripers are referring to the head of your hospital’s neural surgery ward as “Bob,” then a copy of The Pursuit of WOW may be on your administrator’s desk.

I’m confident that, overall, Tom Peters’ impact on the business world has been a positive one. But, as is the case with so many business model advocates or management science theory marketers, without some sort of acid test to evaluate where your ideas lose efficacy, or even stop working altogether, those ideas invariably are applied where they do not belong.

And then disaster ensues.