Tom Peters

‘You should be bonkers in a bonkers time!’ Critics have accused him of losing his mind but Tom Peters – self-styled professional loudmouth and co-author of the original business blockbuster – says it is the world that has gone crazy, writes Sathnam Sanghera

It is astonishing how sometimes things – quite big things – can completely pass you by. I was recently struck dumb when a friend – with a Cambridge education – revealed that she did not know where the Pacific Ocean was. I was similarly shocked (and impressed) a few years earlier when a (now former) colleague said she had no idea who or what the Spice Girls were.

But then it was my turn to have my ignorance exposed when I was asked to interview a certain Tom Peters. Tom, who? Eh? Well, came the flabbergasted reply, he’s only, like, the man cited by The Guinness Book of Business Records (in 1996) as the world’s highest-paid management consultant – earning $6.4m ( £3.9m) a year! He’s only the man whose first book, In Search of Excellence, co-written with Robert Waterman, became the original business blockbuster, selling more than 5m copies.

Nope. Never heard of him. But a Google search quickly filled in the gaps. It directed me to the particularly helpful official tompeters! website (the lower casing and red exclamation mark are his corporate branding). This revealed that tompeters! is a Vietnam veteran, has an MBA and PhD from Stanford University, in addition to a degree in engineering, and was formerly a consultant at McKinsey. Rather frighteningly, on the site, tompeters! declares himself a “prince of disorder, champion of bold failures, maestro of zest, professional loudmouth, corporate cheerleader, lover of markets, capitalist pig and card-carrying member of the ACLU”. ACLU? Nope, never heard of that either. He also rather immodestly cites a 2002 study that placed him joint second among the top 50 “Business Intellectuals” in the world, behind Michael Porter, even with Robert Reich and ahead of Peter Drucker.

Educated by this and the hundreds of newspaper profiles in the fat tompeters! cuttings file, I trundled off to meet the man himself in Dublin, where he was speaking at the Booksellers’ Association Annual Conference, promoting his first book in four years – Re-Imagine!, published this autumn by Dorling Kindersley, part of Pearson, which also owns the FT.

It was useful to see him speak because all the cuttings emphasised that a tompeters! seminar was something special. And it was. Part sales pitch, part business seminar and part diatribe, it was unlike anything I have ever seen – a combination of Billy Graham, Sir John Harvey-Jones and Sid Vicious. Mr Peters’s arms flailed, his body perspired and his mouth spat saliva as he paced the auditorium off-stage, shouted, urged the booksellers to react to change in their sector (“If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less!”), demanded that they heed the advice in his book (“I believe that women are the future! I believe that electronics rule!”) and, with his voice temporarily dropping an octave and several decibels, declared just how much he loved books: “The best thing that happened to me was that my mum turned me into a voracious reader at the age of three …”

Thankfully, one-on-one he is a little less manic – more an orange hyphen than a red exclamation mark. But the question, is, after 30 years of doing this, having made a fortune, hit the age of 60, got that lovely farm in Vermont, knocked out 11 books, and his co-writer of In Search of Excellence, Bob Waterman, having semi-retired with dignity, why is he still going? “Bob’s interests are far more eclectic than mine,” he laughs loudly. “We have dramatically different dispositions. I’m a kind of closet academic. I’m not a humanist. I’m not interested in saving humanity. I find the puzzle of the way organisations work interesting.”

Has retirement ever crossed his mind? “No,” he insists, while pointing out that he now does 60 to 75 seminars a year, at least half the number he was doing in the Eighties. “I will carry on. I find the notion of retiring appalling!” And why, bearing in mind that he admits he finds the writing process torturous, has he decided to write another book? “Because I’m pissed off!” he yells. “Bob Waterman once told a reporter ‘Tom’s not happy unless he’s madder than hell about something’ and it’s true. But I happen to believe that all innovation comes, not from market research or carefully crafted focus groups, but from pissed-off people. I know exactly how I want my tombstone to read: Not ‘He got rich’; not ‘He became famous’; not even ‘he got things right’; rather: ‘he was a player’. In other words: he did not sit on the sidelines.”

The new 340-page book, subtitled Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age, attempts to tackle the huge issues that have affected the business world since Mr Peters last wrote a book: everything from September 11 2001 to the scandals at Enron and WorldCom, the internet bubble, the transforming effect of globalisation, the transforming effect of technology, the importance of the role of women in business, and the role of design, branding and talent.

“The only thing that is certain is uncertainty!” exclaims Mr Peters, beginning to explain its contents. “We’re going to have crazier times than even the crazy times we’ve been through, but the point is that people who can move fast, change direction fast, will excel. There was a lovely line in an interview with the eBay CEO Meg Whitman, where she said, ‘Companies used to have strategy meetings twice a year, now we have them twice a week.’ The fact is that the metabolism of enterprise is changing dramatically!”

Mr Peters speaks as he writes and writes as he speaks: there are endless exclamations, quotations and footnotes. He launches into the first of many references to the military – a heavy influence throughout the book, which has an introduction entitled “New war, new business”. “This isn’t a book about war, or Iraq, but at some level the strategies that the military are using now say a lot about enterprise … apparently, and I don’t know the details, but in an almost unprecedented move, the US military has started acquiring technology from start-ups.

“So even though we’ve had massive consolidation in defence contractors, with all the companies designed to go through a massaging proposal process that took years, suddenly we have the military saying they’re going to get their technology from start-ups and implement it in 6/12/18 months. It’s a much more entrepreneurial culture even in the defence world.”

When it comes to the corporate scandals that have rocked the business world in recent years, Mr Peters expresses dismay at what some of the board members got away with but he is surprisingly “un-pissed off” about what happened. “Let it be record, literally,” he says, nodding towards the tape recorder, “that in no way am I an apologist for people like Kenneth Lay and Bernie Ebbers. But I think that a big part of it all is that the basis of economic value is changing. Market values are ethereal, they are incredibly difficult to account for. Coca-Cola, for chrissake, makes Coke syrup, which would probably fill in ten rooms this size, and during their glory days four years ago before the world started to fall apart, they had a market cap of a quarter of trillion dollars! Which means it’s all smoke and mirrors at some level.

“Alan Greenspan has said that none of the service sector productivity level data is reliable. We don’t know how to measure our assets any more. All numbers have turned into mush … the only people that I’m willing to convict as total fools are the new-economy people of 1997 who said the business cycle is over, the market goes north from now until the end of history. In retrospect that was sheer lunacy.”

Hold on, wasn’t tompeters! himself one of these lunatics? Didn’t he say things like “Use the web and e-commerce to reinvent everything”? Couldn’t his writing in the late Nineties be read as a long hymn of praise to his adopted home, Silicon Valley?

“I suppose from time to time I was one of them,” he admits sheepishly. “I was among the worst of the lot in terms of believing the limitlessness of it all. Living in Silicon Valley, I bought the act.” He switches back to his default boisterousness. “But the thing is, I think it was all worthwhile! I’m the number one unabashed fan of the dotcom bubble! We got SO much damned experimentation done in a short period of time, and you learn from that stuff.”

This brings us to the main problem that critics have with Tom Peters: that he has been proved wrong repeatedly and he is inconsistent. When his renowned critics, John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge, senior editors at The Economist, appraised his career in their 1997 book The Witch Doctors, they concluded that what he has done “launching, leading and defining the current (management) guru boom” is more significant than “what he (has) actually said, much of which (has been) subsequently either proved wrong or contradicted by Peters himself”. Mr Peters’s critics often complain that what he celebrates today is likely to be dismissed in his next book and they always like to point out that many of the 43 companies extolled as excellent in In Search of Excellence fell on hard times soon after publication. “Yes, some portion of our original Golden 43 have performed at levels short of ‘excellence’,” says Mr Peters. “Still, by my estimate, about 30 of them have done reasonably well. Forbes.com, God bless them, actually found that our companies did brilliantly on the stock market over 20 years. I thought the opposite, but (apparently) we wildly out-performed the Standard & Poor’s 500. I was shocked. I only wish that I invested money in our own stocks – $10,000 in those stocks in 1982 would have been worth $140,000 in 2002.”

This defence is rare: often, when criticised, Mr Peters just concedes. When asked what he thought about the long story in Fortune magazine three years ago that alleged that he had “gone bonkers” and “lost his mind”, he says: “I found the article kind of interesting – not a bad analysis. Some of my friends were offended by it, but I thought it was pretty good. The thing is, the world is bonkers! The things you could be confident of in business 30 years ago have become unglued. In 1982 IBM ruled the roost, they were the IT company. Bill Gates was not even a fuzzy dot on the radar screen. Then at the peak of the internet bubble you had a marketcap for Microsoft three times the size of IBM. So that’s kind of bonkers! That’s kind of my message! You should be bonkers in a bonkers time!”

Such defence – or lack of defence – will infuriate his critics, who interpret it as being typical not only of his flakiness, but of the flakiness of the whole management guru industry he has helped spawn. But it will delight his many fans, who interpret Mr Peters’s ability to hold two contrary thoughts in his mind without losing his mind as a sign of his fierce intelligence. Even his critics, Micklethwait and Woolridge, concede that Mr Peters has many admirable talents: a talent for making management interesting; an ability to write books for “the real world, for people to use”. Despite the contradictions, they say there is a strange, deeper consistency to his work: “Peters is the Michel Foucault of the management world: a scourge of the rationalist tradition and a celebrant of the creative necessity of chaos and craziness.”

Peters likes this theory: “If you really look at my work, you will find incredible consistency in the core beliefs. The first of our eight principles In Search of Excellence is bias for action; I basically say the same thing now, just in different language. There are some fascinating consistencies … as well as inconsistencies. But I’m proud of the inconsistency too! Being totally consistent in the face of dramatic challenges is silly!”

Published 23 September 2003
(c) 2003 The Financial Times Limited.