One Minute Excellence - Tom Peters

No one, I mean no one has inspired my business philosophy more than Tom Peters. Jim 

One-minute excellence. I can sense the curling of your lips. While such a moniker makes me shudder, too, there's a gem in there waiting to be discovered.

How do you go on an effective diet? How do you stop smoking? How do you stop drinking?

In short, you do it and it's done. Then you work like hell for the rest of your life to stay on the weight-loss, cigarette-less or booze-free wagon.

A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent stuff.

The idea is profound.

Suppose you're a waiter and, for your own future's sake (forget the clowns who run the restaurant), you decide to set a matchless standard for service. How? You do it. Now.

Sure you'll be clumsy at first. You'll get a lot wrong. You'll need to read up, listen to audio tapes, take classes, tune in to on-line electronic chat rooms, visit other restaurants to collect clues. And you'll need to keep doing such things to maintain your edge (as an opera singer or professional athlete does) until the day you hang up your corkscrew.

Nonetheless, you can become excellent in a nanosecond, starting with your first guest tonight. Simply picture yourself even if it's a very fuzzy picture, as the greatest waiter ever -- and start acting accordingly. Put yourself in the lights on Broadway, as a galaxy-class waiter; then perform your script with derring-do.

Does it sound wild? Silly? Maybe, but it isn't. For the first 99.9 percent of getting from here to there is the determination to do it, and not to compromise, no matter what sort of roadblocks those around you (including peers) erect.

The last 99.9 percent (I know it adds up to more than 100 percent -- that's life) is working like the devil to (1) keep your dobber up amid inevitable storms, (2) learn something new every day, and (3) practice that something, awkward or not, every day, come hell or high water.

What holds for the waiter holds for the chief executive of the six- or 16,000- person firm. (And for the supervisor with four employees in the insurance brokerage.)

How long does it take you, as boss, to achieve world-class quality? Less than a nanosecond to attain it, a lifetime of passionate pursuit to maintain it.

Once the fire is lit, assume you've arrived -- and never, ever look back or do anything, no matter how trivial, that's inconsistent with your newfound quality persona.

Suppose you commit to new heights in quality or service here and now. In your own mind, you're an instant Nordstrom (retail) or Motorola (manufacturing). But your next task, dratted real world, is to go through your boring in-basket.

What an opportunity! So you don't know much about Nordstrom or Motorola (yet!) ; nonetheless, respond to the first item in your in-basket as you imagine a Nordstrom or Motorola exec would.

A memo from a front-line worker complaining about a silly roadblock to improvement? A request to change office-supply vendors? An irate note from a customer or distributor? "Nordstrom" it. "Motorola" it. Act out, in a small way, your Nordstrom-Motorola fantasy of matchless quality.

Sure, if you keep it up for even a few hours, peers and subordinates and bosses will start looking at you oddly. Which is exactly the point. And your first tiny victory. You, Ms. Planet-class Quality, are living a new life. Their misfortune that they haven't figured it out yet.

Does all this amount to a quarter-baked pep talk better fit for a revival tent? Hardly. (And if you don't believe me, ask a friend in Alcoholics Anonymous, perhaps the most effective change program on earth today. You see, the deeper point is that you'll either change in a nanosecond -- or never. It's true with booze, smokes, fat and world-class quality. The determined shift of mindset is an all-or-nothing deal.

Fact is, I'm fed up to my eyebrows with execs (and folks of every other rank) who talk about how 1-o-n-g it takes to achieve change. Pure, unadulterated rubbish. It takes forever to maintain change ("one day at a time"- AA); it takes but a flash to achieve change of even the most dramatic sort.

One morning, in Houston, almost five years ago, I was a non-exerciser. For a series of not very profound reasons, I went out at 5 a.m. and took my first, bumbling speed walk. Eleven minutes later (OK, quite a few nanoseconds), I was hooked. Every day I fret that I'll renege. It's a lifetime's pursuit, which causes pain some days (e.g., as I write, it's unseasonably cold, rainy and getting late). But as of that morning, I was a no-baloney, world-class, rudely dogmatic exerciser.

It is that simple. Honest.

(C) 1993 TPG Communications.

All rights reserved. http://www.tompeters.com/column/1993/005429.php

Tom Peters: Ten Questions on Excellence

In the 20-odd months since In Search of Excellence was published, I have spoken to some 400 audiences. They were in Maui, Hawaii; and Geneva, Switzerland. They were representatives of old industries like steel and forest products, and of new industries like software and gourmet chocolate-chip cookies. They included everyone from a top wholesaler of plumbing and electrical fixtures in Sweden to the owner of the world's largest dairy store, in Norwalk, Conn. Among them were 5,000 city managers, 1,000 bakers, and the senior management of Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc.

Surprisingly, despite the diversity of the audiences, they all asked similar questions. What follows is a distillation of those questions -- and of how I try to respond.

1. Excellence focused on large companies. But is there anything you learned that relates to the particular problems and opportunities of smaller companies?

There is a lot of advice and writing on the transition a small company must go through as it grows. It suggests an inevitable cycle of deterioration, an evolution from a highly charged, entrepreneurial, customer-intensive enterprise to a bureaucracy. The implied message is: "You're going to become calcified; it's just a matter of how soon."

There is a germ of truth in this. There is no doubt that the $15-million company, no matter what the business, needs a more highly articulated set of procedures for controlling things than the $100,000 company does.But most of the scenario is hogwash. The magic of W. L. Gore, Dana, Emerson Electric, 3M, Hewlett-Packard, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Milliken, and Johnson & Johnson -- in other words, the companies we hold up as excellent -- is that they have all retained a much higher share of their "small company" simplicity and vitality than their less effective competitors have.

The message of Excellence is that the key to corporate success lies in superior customer service, continuing internal entrepreneurship, and a deep belief in the dignity, worth, and potential of every person in the organization. There is no iron law that says you must lose those virtues as you grow; in fact, the principal job of senior officers of a small corporation is to maintain them. The tools may be different for a Disneyland than for a one-park, 20-acre establishment. But the intensity of customer focus can and must be maintained. The personal touch -- we call it Management By Wandering Around, courtesy of Hewlett-Packard -- can also be maintained. Giving up MBWA is not an imperative of size. But the sad news is that small companies can lose touch very easily and that the basics of Excellence are at issue from the start.

2. Excellence also focused on the concerns of people who are building companies, using models of enterprises that have been people-oriented and innovative since inception. But what can you do if you inherit a company that has been bureaucratic or lackluster for decades?

Successful turnarounds are a tough act, but what is perhaps most interesting about them is that they follow exactly the same form as the new-company building efforts. The greatest turnaround artists work repetitiously on creating distinctive strategic skills. They are tireless.Each, above all, believes in the power of a thousand little things done just a bit better.

A handful of stories come to mind. Rene McPherson inherited, as chairman, a then-$1-billion (now more than $3-billion) business in Toledo -- Dana Corp., a manufacturer of such products as brass propeller blades and axles, a company he described as "having the rottenest product line ever granted by God to a Fortune 500 company." In the 1970s he turned it around to the point at which it became the number 2 company among the 500 in return to investors. McPherson radically decentralized. He gave the factory managers autonomy and the tools to do the job: finance, personnel, purchasing, computers, etc. He created an exciting, no-nonsense, competitive environment with a ceaseless focus on practical productivity improvements. His focus was the people on the line -- "the boss of their 25 square feet," in McPherson's terms.

More important was McPherson's approach to change. When he is asked to comment on the importance of any particular program in his productivity-improvement process, he shoots back with: "It is damned important. Another feather on the scale."

A different sort of turnaround is PepsiCo Inc. Fifteen years ago it was a sleepy, second-rate competitor to The Coca-Cola Co. Today it is a vital, entrepreneurial, $7.5-billion company. The magic has been brute persistence, never assuming that the job is complete.President Andy Pearson's strategy, while in the field with a division, is to avoid the executive suite like the plague. He first zeros in on the young assistant brand manager, and he always asks the same damned questions. "What have you learned in the last 96 hours? What's going on in the test market? What are you up to?" That's the PepsiCo magic. Every one of Pearson's talks is, at best, another feather on the scale.

The theme is incredibly consistent, regardless of the company, yet each variation of the theme is unique.Successful turnabout artists are, pure and simple, no more and no less, broken records. No stone is left unturned. No stone is especially important. Yet no stone is unimportant.

3. One of Excellence's premises is that a company's attitudes about people, products, and its way of doing business are defined by its founder. The book holds up Tom Watson, the founder of IBM Corp. and the inspiration for many of IBM's characteristic values and practices, as a model. But what if the founder of your company lacks Watson's stature?

There are several ways to answer this question. Most important is to challenge the notion that the people who run the socalled excellent companies are 17 feet tall with well-honed tap-dancing skills. It's not so. Some are extroverts. Many are introverts. Tom Watson Sr. was, in his own words, an "avowed showman." On the other hand, if you're more than seven inches away from Bill Hewlett, you have a tought time hearing him. But they all have one thing in common.Almost all are obsessives.

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Jim Woods is principal and founder of InnoThink Group. A strategic innovation consulting firm engaged to catalyze bottom-line growth. He has worked with government, U.S. Army, MITRE Corporation, Pitney Bowes, Whirlpool, and 3M. Jim’s business experiences, extensive research on competitive strategy and innovation have given him a fresh perspective on improving individual and organizational performance. Jim is a prolific speaker on strategic innovation, creative leadership, uncertainty and competitive strategy. Speak with us for consulting or speaking engagements call 719-266-6703 or click here for more information.  Follow us @innothinkgroup LinkedIn Facebook

 

IDEO’s chairman and founder David Kelley talks about regaining creative confidence: Innovation 101

Innovators aren't exceptional as much as they are confident. So says David Kelley, the founder of the venerable Palo Alto, Calif., design firm IDEO.

Mr. Kelley, whose company is responsible for designing a wide range of products and services, including the modern computer mouse, believes—and research suggests—that virtually everyone has the capacity to innovate. It's just that somewhere around the fourth grade most of us stop thinking of ourselves as creative, he says, so our ability to innovate atrophies.

Mr. Kelley has made it his life's work to help people regain their creative confidence. In his three decades as a designer and as a professor in the design program at Stanford University's engineering school, from which he graduated in 1978, Mr. Kelley has developed a set of techniques for solving all kinds of problems—techniques that he came to believe could be taught as a methodology. His approach is called "design thinking."

Six years ago, with a $35 million gift from German software magnate Hasso Plattner, co-founder of SAP AG and a onetime IDEO client, Mr. Kelley founded the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford—dubbed the d.school—a nondegree program that draws students from all seven of Stanford's graduate schools. The program aims to help students unlock their creative potential by teaching them to become, among other things, more open to experimentation, more comfortable with ambiguity and less afraid of failure.

Teaching the Process

The best way to unleash creativity, Mr. Kelley says, is to give students an "experience," or in d.school speak, a design challenge. Under his teaching model, however, students aren't just handed a problem to solve—they must define the problem themselves through research and direct observation.

David Kelley says most of us stop thinking of ourselves as creative somewhere around the fourth grade

One group of students, for example, was tasked with designing an incubator for the developing world, where infant mortality is high and expensive incubators are scarce. But when the students were dispatched to Nepal to spend time with mothers and doctors, they found that most births take place in rural areas far from hospitals, so flooding hospitals with cheaper incubators would be of no use to most premature and low-birth-weight babies.

Equipped with this knowledge, and, as Mr. Kelley sees it, a newfound empathy for their subjects, the students reframed the problem. "This was about keeping babies warm, not cheaper incubators," explains George Kembel, executive director and co-founder of the d.school.

The second step in the process is "ideation," where students visualize and brainstorm potential solutions with one another. The students decided that what was needed was an inexpensive baby-warming device that could function in rural communities—one that was transportable, simple to use and sanitize, and worked without electricity.

Next comes "prototyping." The students made sketches and three-dimensional models of potential incubators that they could test, modify, and test again, in an iterative process that is at the heart of design thinking. By the end of the class they had a finished prototype—a kind of sleeping bag made of special material that could be wrapped around a premature infant and kept clean and warm with nothing more than boiling water. The students went on to form a nonprofit company in the hopes of bringing their Embrace incubator to market.

Mr. Kembel says the learning experience at the d.school is centered on a few basic beliefs. One is that people learn by doing, so the more projects students tackle the better. The same goes for developing prototypes. Speed and quantity are encouraged in the hope that students will fail early and often. "If you go through lots of little tests, you learn more than if you just do one test," says Mr. Kembel.

Another guiding principle is that people learn best by collaborating with others who have radically different points of view, so classes should be made up of students and teachers from a variety of disciplines—the more the better.

Moreover, "everyone needs to have an equal voice," says Mr. Kembel, "because everyone in a sense is learning, even the faculty." So the old model of teacher at podium lecturing students has been thrown out in favor of classrooms that look more like studios, with tables and chairs scattered about.

Mr. Kembel says a lot of time at the d.school is spent helping students unlearn things they learned in elementary school. Fear of failure is rampant among students who have been drilled in standardized-test taking, he says. "What we want the graduate students to do is work with others and go out and take risks," says Mr. Kembel.

Making Waves

The d.school is reporting progress on several fronts.

It now enrolls 700 students per year, up from 30 six years ago. Applications are running at two to three times the number of available slots, Mr. Kembel says, and increasing numbers of students are choosing to attend Stanford because of the d.school. He also says employers are starting to seek out students with d.school credentials.

The d.school has produced several companies, including d.light design, which makes solar-powered lanterns for the developing world; Alphonso Labs, which markets Pulse, a news-reading application for iPhone, iPad and Android devices; and of course, Embrace, which hatched from the incubator project.

Almost weekly, educators from around the world make the pilgrimage to Palo Alto to take tours and get advice on how to set up d.school-like programs of their own. Dozens of colleges have programs in various stages of development.

More recently, the d.school has been teaching K-12 teachers how to employ design-thinking techniques in their classrooms. Last year alone, more than 500 educators attended workshops at the d.school's K-12 lab. Research is under way, but early indications are that K-12 students exposed to design thinking are more engaged and motivated to learn, say Rich Crandall, director, and Adam Royalty, founding member and lead researcher, of the K-12 lab.

To Mr. Kelley, that is the Holy Grail of design thinking. He says it is behavioral change that enables students to gain innovation confidence, something he believes is as important as gaining literacy skills. "For me this is a mindset," he says. "It's a way of thinking that you can use in every part of your life."

Ms. Geer is a writer in Connecticut. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com. via online.wsj.com

 Speaking 

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth. 

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