The first management book that resonated with me was In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman. It was published in 1982. Moreover, it shaped my approach to management throughout my career and spurred my interest in getting an MBA.
Many things have changed in the 35 years. However, a lot of what I learned from the book remains just as relevant today.
Peters and Waterman argued that the following eight common themes were responsible for the success of organizations that they studied:
- A bias for action and active decision making — facilitating quick decision making and problem-solving avoids bureaucratic control
- Being close to your customer — learning from the people using your products and services
- Autonomy and entrepreneurship — fostering innovators and nurturing 'champions'
- Productivity through people — engaging employees is the source of quality
- Hands-on, value-driven — installing a management philosophy that guides everyday practice - management showing its commitment
- Stick to your knitting — staying with the business that you know
- Simple form, lean staff — optimizing the structure and where advice comes from
- Simultaneous loose-tight properties — providing autonomy for shop-floor activities that operate within a set of centralized values
Organizational psychologists Eugene Webb and James March at Stanford shaped Peters’ management approach. In brief, they drove home the critical importance of staff in accomplishing organizational success. In like manner, his two tours of duty as a combat engineer and naval officer in the Vietnam war as left an indelible impression on Peters and shaped his approach to leadership.
The Excellence Dividend
Cut the BS. Can the excuses. Forget the fancy reports. Get moving now. Get the job done. On this score, nothing has changed in 50 years, including the maddening fact that all too often a business strategy is inspiring, but the execution mania is largely AWOL.”—Tom Peters
Peters new book, The Excellence Dividend advances that a commitment to excellence and “putting people first.” All things considered, it is the best path forward in the face of overwhelming change — just like 35 years ago!
Having a high-quality product or service that is designed and delivered by engaged people committed to a shared goal and each other drives success. Accordingly, Peters provides simple, actionable for success for a business leader. The roadmap provided in the book is useful for both you and your organization in today’s high-tech world.
Businesses that are committed to excellence in all aspects of their internal and external dealings increase their chances of success as they:
- have better and more spirited workplaces
- engage employees, who are growing and preparing for tomorrow
- keep customers, who are happier and inclined to spread tales of their excellence far and wide
- are good neighbours in the communities they serve
- are reliable partners for vendors
These factors translate into bottom-line results and growth. Moreover, AI and robotics still turn into jobs that last and lead to the creation of new jobs as well. Excellence is not a metric. Ultimately, it is a state of mind, a way of being.
Management Is Not Complicated
In positive psychology, flow—being in the zone—is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
Management is about the essence of human behaviour. In the end, it is about how you fundamentally arrange the collective efforts to survive, adapt, thrive and achieve excellence, both individually and organizationally. For an individual this is flow. For an organization this is alignment.
Most leaders already know what they should do, however, too few act on this knowledge in a consistent way. In The Excellence Dividend, Peters sets out the most common infractions:
Execution
Poor cross-functional coordination and communication is the principal element in the delay of everything.” — Tom Peters
Internal barriers are the biggest impediment to effective execution. Getting functions to stop feuding is not enough. Above all, they need to work together in a spirited, coordinated way. I develop and have used the goal alignment program (GAP) based on Peters’ insight related to excellence and the theory of constraints. For that reason, I have updated the adage “what gets measured gets done” to “what gets funded and rewarded gets done.”
The wrong measure drives the wrong behaviour. Utilimately, when every resource is increasingly contributing to your mission, you will achieve ongoing success. In GAP, we offer contribution-based budgeting and outcome-oriented performance indicators, weighed by their relative contribution.
Excellence Is the Sum Of The Small, Everyday Acts
Excellence is conventionally seen as a long-term aspiration. I disagree. Excellence is the next five minutes.” — Tom Peters
Your future customer interaction is a measure of organizational excellence. You need to listen to your team and take responsibility and apologize when a mistake is made.
Achieving excellence results from high performance throughout the organization. Every process performed in your organization has an external or internal customer as its result. If only one process fails to deliver high-performance results, a customer will be affected.
Culture Is the Game
CEO job No. 1 is setting — and micro-nourishing one day, one hour, one minute at a time — an effective people-truly-first, innovate-or-die, excellence-or-bust corporate culture.” — Tom Peters
Lou Gerstner led the IBM’s turnaround in the 1990s. He said that when it comes to shaping the behaviours and attitudes of thousands of employees, “culture is not just one aspect of the game — it is the game.”
Corporate culture defines a business. It makes a huge difference when it comes to retaining employees, keeping them engaged, and keeping them satisfied. Sixty-four percent of employees feel like they do not have a strong work culture. Most companies fall short in providing their staff what they need to succeed in the workplace.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” — Peter Drucker
Your culture reflects what your organization stands for. Your employees are the voice of your business. They are critical to ensuring that it succeeds. When you provide a work environment that your staff enjoys spending time in, it can help to improve their performance every day.
Aligning people to the culture is crucial. It is easy to say that you want a great culture. However, it is quite another to shape people's thoughts and beliefs around this vision you have. When people are excited, proud and appreciative of the culture, success is just around the corner. Enlist them, empower them and encourage them. When your employees "own" your culture it will thrive.
Put Employees First
Invest in your employees and the future of your company. Think about the long-term and do not get distracted by short-term profits. Your employees and their jobs are more important than anything else.”— Philip Day, Edinburgh Woollen Mill
Customers always come first. They are important people. Without them the organization is nothing. It drives almost every aspect of a company. Today, customers have never been more powerful. They have high expectations, much greater choice, and are more demanding than ever before. Their feedback on review sites and social media are instant. Online shopping and other disruptive services have created a culture that focuses on personalization and customer-centricity.
Treating your customers is important. However, treating your employees better than your customers is critical to your success. Excellent customer experiences depend on exceptional employee experiences. It is your employees who make or break the customer connection. So, put your employees first. That means best-fit-hiring of empathetic, curious people with good character, and developing them. Our people analytics identifies potential high-performers.
Training is any firm’s single most important capital investment.” — Tom Peters
You need to draw on the talent stack of every person in your organization. They can generate new ideas that can help you innovate and stay ahead of your competition. Share your thoughts on the business. Listen and learn from them. Include them in the decision-making process. There must be trust on both sides for this to work, right up to the top. Sixty-one percent of employees say trust between them and their senior management is fundamental to job satisfaction.
Excellence is a state of mind. It is a human-driven affair. Excellence is reflected in the staff’s attitude. It translates into an emotional bond with customers and communities in a way that cannot be replaceable by algorithms.
To Be A Leader Ask Questions and Listen
Effective helping begins with pure inquiry.”— Ed Schein, MIT
Listening is the bedrock of leadership excellence. You need to learn how to do it well and practice it. Leadership is not complicated once you understand the competencies required at each level of leadership and your natural preference — your behavioural DNA. Everyone in the organization needs to be a leader.
I always write ‘LISTEN’ on the back of my hand before a meeting.” — Tom Peters
Your frontline leaders are the principal causes of your productivity, employee retention, product or service quality. You want to have them:
- embody corporate culture
- be the champions of excellence and employee development
- connect the aspirations of the business to the people who do the work
- animate and exemplify the culture of the organization
The more you are observant of your surroundings, the more likely you are to capture a valuable resource or avoid tragedy. Lucky people do not magically attract new opportunities and good fortune. They stroll along with their eyes wide open, fully present in the moment (a problem for people glued to phone screens).
Many people think leadership is all about having the right answers at the ready. Leadership is straightforward, you know where you want to go, you need to observe your current reality and seek help to close the gap. Moreover, no matter how experienced you are — understand the importance of showing humility by asking questions and seeking out help is real leadership.
Great leaders understand that it’s not easy to translate vision into reality. And they realize they can’t do it alone. The most effective leaders are those who seek out what they and their company need. That kind of growth mindset is ageless.” — Chip Conley
Strategy That Adds Value
Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” —Michael Porter
Success requires you to transition from “we need to create a strategic plan” to “we need to create a strategy.” Most people see strategy as an exercise to produce a planning document. If you have this view, your strategy will look like a long list of initiatives with timeframes associated and resources assigned.
We treat strategy-making as developing a set of answers to five interlinked questions with strategic insight. The items cascade from the first to the last. Refining the answers through multiple iterations leads to a winning strategy.
- What are our broad aspirations for our organization and the concrete goals against which we can measure our progress?
- Across the potential field available to us, where will we choose to play and not play?
- In our chosen place to play, how will we choose to win against the competitors there?
- What capabilities are necessary to build and maintain to win in our chosen manner?
- What management systems are necessary to build, operate and maintain the key capabilities?
Our approach makes strategy more natural and more meaningful for you. It saves you from endless visioning exercises, misdirected SWOT analyses, and lots of uninformed big thinking. We help you in crafting your strategy in concrete chunks through iteration of the answers to the five questions. The result is that you get a better strategy that you can carry out, with much less pain and wasted time.
The fourth and fifth Questions are central to excellence in execution.
Underserved Markets
Peters advances two strategies related to “where to play.” They are focused on underserved markets.
- Women — the estimated consumer market is $20 trillion annually. Women make a majority of consumer and business purchasing decisions. The problem is most companies are not prepared to serve the women. Does the composition of your team look like the composition of the market you aim to serve? Many studies show that diversity and inclusion are tell-tale signs of profitable companies.
- Ageing population — there are more than 100 million people over age 50 in the U.S. alone. For the next ten years, one Baby Boomer will turn 65 every eight seconds. Households that are headed by someone age 50 or older have 47 times more net wealth than households headed by individuals under age 35. A 50-year-old on average has another 31 years of life to spend it. A 70-year-old is expected on average to have another 15 years as a consumer.
However, most firms seem to be missing these opportunities. Companies cannot treat these markets like an initiative. It requires a stem-to-stern assessment of skills, assets, and culture that could be brought to bear on the market.
Show Your Appreciation
Every company needs a strategic reward system for employees. The system needs to address these four areas: compensation, benefits, recognition, and appreciation. The problem with reward systems in most businesses today is twofold:
- They are missing one or more of these elements—usually recognition and appreciation
- The parts are not aligned with the company's strategy
Recognition and appreciation are integral components of an effective strategic reward system. These two elements rarely receive the attention they deserve. I find this to be amazing as these elements are low-cost and provide a high-return. Your employees like to know whether they are doing good, bad, or average. It is crucial that you tell them.
While giving acknowledgement is a desirable human trait. It is also your best booster for profit and growth. Customer engagement is a direct result of employee engagement. Employees who feel significant are far more likely to go the extra mile for their teammates and their customers.
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