#427： The Excellence Dividend
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Summary
In today s hyper competitive market, in which technology is eating jobs, what sets the successful companies and workers apart from the ones that flounder? My guest today argues it could be something as little as saying hello and helping an old lady with her wheelchair.
Transcript
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This episode of the Art of Manliness podcast is brought to you by Huckberry. Huckberry is my
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athleticgreens.com slash manliness. Again, athleticgreens.com slash manliness to claim
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your special offer today. Don't miss this. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the
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Art of Manliness podcast. In today's hyper competitive market in which technology is
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eating jobs, what sets the successful companies and workers apart from the ones that flounder?
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My guest today argues it could be something as little as saying hello and helping an old lady
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with her wheelchair. His name is Tom Peters and he's a business expert and the author of several
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books on professional success. His latest is called The Excellence Dividend, meaning the tech
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tied with work that wows and jobs that last. Today on the show, Tom and I discuss why the human
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touch and striving for excellence is what will give companies and workers an advantage in today's
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market. Tom shares why execution beats strategy in business and in life, how companies can develop
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a culture of excellence and why the businesses that put customers first win in the long run.
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Tom then makes the impassioned case that business managers who see themselves as coaches of excellence
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and that they have more of an impact on the lives of people than we give them credit for.
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After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash excellence dividend, all one word.
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So you got a new book out, The Excellence Dividend, meaning the tech tied with work that
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wows and jobs that last. You published a book or co-authored a book back in, I was in 82, correct?
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Not to make you feel old. But it was In Search of Excellence. For those who aren't familiar with
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that book, what was the main thesis of it? And after that, how was the excellence dividend sort
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of a continuation of that thesis? Or maybe it's different.
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I'll do this as quickly as I can. The Americans came out of World War II in relatively good shape.
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No bombed landscape, et cetera, et cetera. We ruled the world. And starting in the 70s,
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the Japanese started to wake up and send products over. And they were better products. And we bought
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them. And it was shipping. It was steel. And that's one thing. But then suddenly it was automobiles.
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And automobiles are sort of what Americans stand for. And the Japanese magic was, in simple
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terms, cars that work. And a couple of years, three years before In Search of Excellence, a
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couple of Harvard Business School professors had written an article in the Harvard Business
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Review. And it was called Managing Our Way to Economic Decline. And they said, and it's the
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same words we frequently hear today about business schools, they said, we're spending too much time
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about finance and marketing. We're not spending enough time paying attention to the people who
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actually build the automobiles. And so that was the context into which the book came. When Bob
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Waterman and I started our research on In Search of Excellence, the thesis was that criticisms of
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American management were very accurate. But there were still some people who were doing it incredibly
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well. And companies like 3M, companies like Hewlett Packard, a very much smaller Hewlett Packard at the
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time, and so on. And so we wrote about the good guys. And as to the word excellence, it really has, for me,
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a funny kind of history. I had a presentation to give at McKinsey, and I hadn't written it. But I did have
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to go to the San Francisco Ballet with my wife. And it was a magnificent performance. And I'm not sure
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what happened next, but I was starting to work on the presentation. And I thought, isn't it weird?
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We use the word excellence with ballet, with theater, with football, with baseball, with basketball,
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with swimming. We never use the word excellence and business together, which is insane, because of
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a business of two people or 2,000 people is a collection of human beings attempting to get
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something done useful. And so why the hell can't you use the words business and excellence in the
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same sentence? And it was off to the races after that. I mean, there was a lot of steps in between.
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Fundamentally, that's where the word came from. And my passion for excellence, to steal my own second
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book title, has not only diminished, but it's increased. And the reason this book came about
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is my belief that excellence and the intention of excellence are, in fact, by far the best way,
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I hate to use the word defend ourselves, the best way to deal with this tsunami of technology that's
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that's heading our way. And there's a little story I'll tell you if I may. I'm from Albany, New York to
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BWI to Washington and in the morning and flying on Southwest, which is my habit whenever I have the
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chance. Pilots for my plane landed several gates down and they came in late and they were hustling,
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to put it mildly, to get to my gate and to get onto their plane. And of course, getting out on time
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is, you know, is a religion. So they're hustling toward the gate. The gate was the gate that you've seen
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a hundred times and I've seen a thousand times. There were a half a dozen wheelchairs there. So the pilot who
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is under pressure, heading for the gate, turns to the woman in the first wheelchair and says, would you mind
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if I took you down the jetway? I figure I have 7,500 flight legs to my credit. And it was the first
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time I had ever seen anything like that in my life. And it's little human stuff like that, that you
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remember, that sticks in your mind for days, for years, you know, for decades. I remember when I told
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that story to speech recently, some guy came up to me afterwards and he said, he said, you know,
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I've never even seen a pilot look at a passenger before they went down the jetway. But that kind
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of story multiplied by a thousand, I believe will, I believe A is not going to be at least in the short
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term copied by artificial intelligence. And B is the sort of memorable experience that will allow us to
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succeed and in fact find excellence in 2018 as much as was the case back in 82. That's a long-winded
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answer to your question for which I apologize. No, no, that's perfect. So yeah, the first,
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so back in 82, the competition was the Japanese. Right. And now it's robots, artificial intelligence,
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and the way we can combat that. Yeah, I mean, that's obviously a gross oversimplification.
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Exactly. In various industries, we're getting nailed by the Chinese. That's funny. A statistic
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that I've got in the book is we assume that American workers are losing their job to Chinese
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workers. Well, the real reality is over the course of the last, I think it's 15 or 20 years,
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the Chinese have lost 25 million manufacturing jobs or a third of their entire manufacturing
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population. You know, the guys who make the Apple computer, Foxconn, you know, I saw a headline a
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couple of years ago, and this also is in the book, Foxconn placed an order for their production lines
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for 1 million robots. So this ain't an American story. It's an American story of our competitors
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in China and so on. So where we can differentiate ourselves from robots is doing the human stuff that
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robots can't do, showing empathy, doing service, things like that. That's where you try to focus
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on. Yeah. And, you know, let's empathy, service, and so on, but let's stick with hard manufacturing.
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What in the heck is Apple other than an amazing collection of human touches? You know, we talk
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about speed, speed, speed. Everybody's got to get their product out on time and so on. I don't think
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Steve Jobs ever got, he not only never got a product out on time, but he didn't come with
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a year or two of getting a product out in time. And why? Because he was working on, oh, those hundreds
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and thousands of tiny details that made the Apple product today to a significant degree and dramatically
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then different. There's this wonderful line I came across by Steve Jobs' wife, and she was talking
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about Steve and Johnny Ive, who was the head of design. And listen to this sentence carefully.
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It's really so cool. She said, Steve and Johnny would discuss corners, C-O-R-N-E-R-S, for hours on end.
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And why has Apple got the market cap it has today? And the answer is it's got better corners. But the
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attention to corners in a manufacturing product, to me, is exactly analogous to the pilot
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who takes the lady in the wheelchair down the jetway. And so it's hard products, soft products,
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it's services, it's across the board. So the first section of your book is about execution.
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I thought it was interesting. That was the primary focus because a lot of times when people think about
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business or think about starting a business, whether you're a small-time entrepreneur or you're
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a bigger guy, you think about strategy. You got to come up with a plan. But you said that that might
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actually hurt you in the long run if you focus on strategy first and not execution.
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Well, I think we can dramatically overdo the strategy thing. Jack Welsh, who was everybody
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at least for 20 years, once said, he said, what is strategy? He said, strategy is you pick a general
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direction and then you implement like hell. And I knew Welsh and I knew Welsh's GE. And I will guarantee
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you that 95 percent of the action at General Electric was, in fact, on the implementation
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end of stuff. I'll tell you the little story that we start the book with and which I've started
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virtually every presentation for the last half dozen years. The great hotelier Conrad Hilton was
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having his career celebrated at some big gala. People got up and told various stories and finally
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someone ushered Mr. Hilton up to the podium and asked, they said, Mr. Hilton, will you share
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some of your business secrets with us? And Hilton goes up to the podium, looks out at the audience
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of grand people and says, remember to tuck the shower curtain into the bathtub. And with that,
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he turns and walks off the stage. And the logic behind this is, look, I come to your hotel because
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of location, location, location, and because you hired this Swiss architect and it's gorgeous.
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But every business person loses money on the first transaction and makes their money on transaction
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two through 22. And the number of times that they recommend through social media or what have you,
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somebody else. I come to your hotel because of where it is. I come back to your hotel because
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of the shower curtains. And, you know, that's fundamentally the game. The vice chairman of
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GE and Welsh's time and subsequently the head of Allied Signal and Allied was a guy by the name of
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Larry Bossidy. And I'm going to read you a Bossidy quote. Execution is the job of the business
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leader. That's fine. Here's the one to pay attention to. The first thing I look for in a job
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candidate are energy and enthusiasm for execution. Does the candidate talk about the thrill of getting
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things done? And listen to the next clause, the thrill of getting things done, or does she keep
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wandering back to strategy and philosophy? Does she detail the obstacles that had to be overcome,
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the roles played by the people assigned, and so on? And I am not arguing against strategy. I'm just
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saying the essence of life and the essence of success. You know, in business is, in fact, preparation,
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practice, and execution. And I will go to my grave screaming that at the top of my lungs.
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Yeah. And I was reading that. I thought that, you know, it wasn't just applicable for business,
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but also just life in general. We have a lot of younger guys who listen to the podcast and read
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the site, and they're always asking for advice. They're like, you know, what should I do with my
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life? And my general advice is, like, just do something. Because I think a lot of guys, they
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get stuck in just trying to plan out the next 20 years of their life. And I'm like, look, buddy,
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it's not going to go according to plan, but you just got to start going in general directions,
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and things will start opening up. Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things when I give advice
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like that, you know, to people who are relatively junior, is I say one of the great success routes
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take some unbelievably crappy assignment and turn it into excellence. You know, some, your group of 30
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people are going to have a Memorial Day picnic. Nobody wants to manage the damn Memorial Day picnic.
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And so bright-eyed and bushy tail, you say, I'll do this. And you turn that picnic into a circus
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where people have fun, and so on. You don't think that's going to get noticed? And it's, you know,
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it's a thousand strategies like that of, you know, it's that word excellence, which is still stuck in
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my head 35 years after the book. But make that little thing that other people say, yeah, turn it into
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excellent. So, I mean, how do you, as a, say, a manager or a business owner,
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help develop this culture of excellence? Is it something that you can purposely and intentionally
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inculcate? Or is it, do you have to find candidates first to have those attributes and then that will
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take care of itself? Well, obviously it's both, but I do believe that, you know, as I say in the book
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somewhere, excellence is not a long-term aspiration or a hill to climb. Excellence is the next five minutes,
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that next act. Thomas Watson was the founder of the corporation. And somebody asked him at one point,
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this was when IBM was at the top of the game for everybody in the world. And they, they said,
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Mr. Watson, how long does it take to achieve excellence? And he said, one minute. And, you know,
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whoever it was at, huh? And he said, the way excellence is to promise yourself that you will
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never again do anything, no matter how small that isn't excellent. And so, you know, that's the story,
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but I believe, you know, it's that old one-liner that's tiresome, except that it happens to be
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accurate, which is called walk the talk. You know, when you're dealing with communications to a client or
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what have you, every single item that comes out of your part of the organization will be startlingly
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good. And, and it's just, you know, excellence is lived one minute at a time. I mean, think about it.
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I don't know whether you're a sports fan or not, but I happened to live in the San Francisco Bay area
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when the 49ers were at the top of their game. And Bill Walsh was the coach of the 49ers for 10 years.
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And he wrote a book with the world's best title. And the title was called the score takes care of
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itself. And he said, the whole focus was on the practice was on making a culture of professionalism
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in the organization. And if you get that stuff, right, then the odds go way up that at the end
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of the ball game, you will have scored more points than the other guy. So what skills, I mean,
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because you, can we, let me, sorry, I didn't finish up because the way you asked the question
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is you said, or should we find it coming in? And the answer is absolutely. You know, my answer is
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very boring. Both. Remember the little story that I mentioned a couple of minutes, the pilot who took
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the, took the lady in the wheelchair down the jetway. Well, why does that happen? Well, it happens
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because of Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines approach to life, et cetera, et cetera.
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But Colleen Barrett, who was their president, I think she started out as a secretary, actually.
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Somebody asked her kind of the question you asked me. And she said, we hire for listening, caring,
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smiling, saying thank you, and being warm. And we demand those attributes in mechanics and pilots
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in flight attendants or the people at the front desk. So, and there's another guy, heads a, heads a,
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a pharmaceutical company, for God's sakes, where you don't think of sweetness and light in general.
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And it's a, it's not, it's beyond startup, but it's not one of the giants. And somebody asked him
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the question that you asked me, and he said, we only hire nice people. And he said, you know,
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the reality is even in the high level technical jobs, like some, you know, PhD microbiologist,
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he said, there are a lot of PhD microbiologists around actually don't hire the jerks. And his
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situation, I mean, it's wonderful. You know, I could give you two other examples like that,
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but the language would be totally inappropriate. A guy who heads a special effects company in the
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movie world who said, never hire. And the word begins with a, and, and so on. But this pharmaceutical
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guy's amazing. He said, look, I interview you, you have this incredible degree from MIT or Berkeley
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or heaven alone knows where, and I would give my left and right arms to have you on our staff.
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But after my conversation with you, you have to do what we call, this is him saying, we,
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you've got to run the gauntlet. And that gauntlet is a dozen short interviews with receptionists,
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with secretaries, with low level people in the finance department. And any single one of those
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people can in fact, stop you from getting the job if they don't think you're the kind of person who
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will fit our culture. And that is strong language in a very unexpected place.
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Yeah. I mean, so this goes, yeah, I like that idea that for an employee, the way to differentiate
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yourself, because everyone probably has a degree, right? If you're going for a job that has a minimum
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requirement for, you know, for specialties or knowledge, lots of people have that. The thing
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that's going to separate yours from everyone else is this, again, those soft human skills,
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Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, a la the example of the pharmaceutical company, you know, you can say,
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well, an airline is a service business, but I'm in the hard nose business. Well, there ain't nothing
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harder than pharmaceuticals. And so this human touch and specialness that gets things done,
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you know, I'm arguing, well, let me let me give you another example, which is really mind blowing to
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me. Unfortunately, it's not in the book, because I came across it after the fact. So think of the soft
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traits now, and I'm going to read this, it's a paragraph. Project Oxygen data from founding in
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1998 to 2013, shocked everyone at Google by concluding that among the eight most important
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of Google's top employees, STEM, the almighty STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics,
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STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of the top employees at Google
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are all soft skills, being a good coach, communicating and listening well, possessing insights into others,
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including others with different values and points of view, having empathy toward and being supportive
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of one's colleagues, being a good critical thinker and problem solver, and being able to make connections
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across complex ideas. So I, I love the idea that, you know, I don't know what, but I would say in terms
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of intellect, I would say that Google is probably the toughest company around. And yet they find that
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the people who do the best work are, you know, got decent STEM background, I'm sure, but are the people
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who have the soft skills and back to our original execution conversation, who get things done. And they even
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found in some further work that the most creative teams, it's, it's funny, they, they categorize their
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employees, which I don't think is a great idea, but that's another discussion into A players and B players
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and the B player teams outperform the A player teams and they outperform the A player teams again,
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because of all these soft skills of, of sharing information and so on. And you end up with more
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creative projects. We're going to take a quick break for your words, more sponsors, Jeremy here,
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Yeah. And this applies to even what we would consider blue collar work as well. My experience
00:24:45.740
with hiring contractors for stuff on my house, I'll always go with the guy that returns phone
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calls on time, provides excellent service, gives me updates on things, just those soft skills.
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And then there's other people, they might be really knowledgeable and good what they do,
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but they don't return your phone calls. They don't keep you updated on the status of the project.
00:25:07.600
I'm like, that's just super frustrating. I'm always going to go with the guy that
00:25:11.360
provides the best customer service. I would be more than happy to spend the rest of our
00:25:15.860
conversation on what you just talked about. And the reason I say that is the reality is a small
00:25:22.060
share of our employed citizenry, Fortune 500, and 80% of us work in smaller businesses. And I would just
00:25:31.620
like to take every single word you just said and multiply it by a thousand and nod my head and
00:25:37.780
say how much I agree. The story I always tell is, it's just exactly yours. My wife and I were having
00:25:44.420
a major construction project done and we've gotten some recommendations for builders. And so the builder
00:25:51.760
is coming over to our house for an 11 o'clock meeting. And I just happened to be out in the front yard
00:25:59.260
at 1045. And there's a hedge that I'm looking at 1045. I see a truck pull up around the corner from our
00:26:10.360
house at 11 o'clock. And honest to God, if I had a track coaches stopwatch at 11 o'clock, exactly.
00:26:19.260
The guy pulls into my driveway, looks great. He looks great. And by looking great, I'm not talking
00:26:26.320
about he was wearing the kind of suit and tie that you might wear on Wall Street, but he's tidy,
00:26:30.460
he's clean, he looks like he's, it was just what you said. Fundamentally, he had the job. We knew he
00:26:37.020
could build stuff. 10 people had told us that, but it was really, his entire project was insanely
00:26:43.260
professional and you could smell it from a mile away. And one of the things I talk about in the book
00:26:48.980
is I would love to be able to help 500,000 small companies like that pursue excellence,
00:26:59.740
achieve excellence, and each one of them add two employees. And we've just added a million jobs,
00:27:05.940
good jobs to our payroll. I love those companies.
00:27:10.180
Yeah. And I've had that experience too, with my own business, having, you know, hiring out
00:27:14.200
contract work for like videography or graphic design or things like that. There's tons of
00:27:19.880
those types of people out there. You know, everyone wants to be a graphic designer.
00:27:24.620
It goes the whole way. You know, I get paid a lot of money to give a speech and people think
00:27:29.220
I'm crazy. Even people who do what I do because I, you know, I, I get on a plane and arrive two days
00:27:36.640
later. My speech isn't worth a damn if I don't give it. And, you know, in my view, I, you know,
00:27:43.240
I'm, I'm, I'm really apologize ahead of time. I'm, I'm bragging here, but a couple of times I had
00:27:51.720
flu, but in terms of preventable on time service, I think I've missed about our speeches out of three
00:28:02.760
or 4,000 and that don't grow on trees, brother. That comes from, you know, knowing that the
00:28:08.420
execution of being there is far more important than the content when I arrive.
00:28:16.600
I love you had this whole section on leadership and how to lead for excellence. I mean, maybe walk us
00:28:23.200
through some of your favorite traits or tactics leaders need to implement.
00:28:28.020
Well, you know, the, the, the thing, the thing about that chapter is I promise in the
00:28:36.700
first paragraph, I'm going to talk about vision. I'm not going to talk about authenticity. I'm not
00:28:42.300
going to talk about disruption. And I call the paragraph, this is very intellectual, or sorry,
00:28:50.560
the chapter is called some stuff. And by some stuff, I mean, things virtually any leader can do
00:29:01.060
that will make her or him more effective. I'm not arguing against vision. I'm not arguing against
00:29:06.640
authenticity, but all I want to do in that chapter is give people in this instance, 26 ideas that will,
00:29:15.900
in fact, make them better. And just take, just take a couple. Doug Conant was the CEO of Campbell
00:29:25.140
Soup for 10 years. During that 10 year tenure, he wrote to employees 30,000 handwritten thank you
00:29:37.880
notes. That adds up as far as I can tell in terms of about, you know, about 10 per working day or
00:29:44.420
something like that. And, and, and, and that, you know, what do people want most? They want to be
00:29:50.260
recognized. They want, they want to count. And, you know, I don't think there are two more powerful
00:29:56.000
words in English language than thank you. You know, it's the world's number one motivator. So I write
00:30:01.880
about thank you notes. I write about my favorite topic, which was in, in search of excellence in 82,
00:30:09.860
which my coauthor Bob Borderman and I found at Hewlett Packard. And that is MBWA or managing by
00:30:17.820
wandering around and too few bosses get out of it. They got a thousand things to do. They're busy as
00:30:25.240
hell, but you've got to be visible. You've got to hang out. You've got to understand people. You've
00:30:30.980
got to per your earlier point about excellence and mine about excellence is one small activity at a
00:30:37.300
time. You've got to illustrate what excellence means. So get out, hang out, spend time. And,
00:30:44.660
and, you know, MBWA is a gift from the gods. And another thing that I say when you're for leaders,
00:30:51.740
when you're dealing with people, what I do is I have this incredibly complicated formula,
00:30:57.500
which I call 14 equals 14. Suppose you're running a training department or a subset of a logistics
00:31:04.200
department with 14 employees. The number one secret to success is to understand that not
00:31:12.300
one people is anything like any of the rest of those people. They are all radically different. When
00:31:20.380
it comes to a motivation strategy, when it comes to a communication strategy, you must have 14
00:31:26.800
dramatically tailored different approaches. Now, I don't know how that sounds to people who are
00:31:33.040
listening to us, but here's what I do know. Suppose you have a kid who is eight years old or seven years
00:31:40.540
old, and she is in the second grade, right? What is the definition of an excellent second grade teacher?
00:31:50.620
And it is pure and simple the following. That teacher understands that each of her 17 kids
00:31:58.140
is totally different than the other 16 kids. And she has 17, you know, subject matter may be arithmetic,
00:32:05.740
but she has 17 different strategies for dealing with Mary and dealing with Hank and dealing with
00:32:14.240
Joan. And so stuff like 14 equals 14, managing by wandering around, saying, thank you, I've got 26 of
00:32:22.580
those. And they don't add up to vision, but they damn well each one of you, each one of them make
00:32:28.740
you just a little bit better as a leader. And that's, that's all I want. And the way you lay this
00:32:34.840
out too, is you, it makes it sound like managers play an important role in the success of a company
00:32:40.580
and in the employee. Because I think oftentimes managers, you know, thanks to Dilbert and things like
00:32:44.600
that sort of get the stereotype of just, I don't know, boring, unpleasant, whatever, but managers
00:32:52.020
sound like they can become coaches of excellence. Absolutely. I make a grand and bold statement in
00:33:00.820
the book somewhere. And I say, excellent management is the highest of human inspirations. And an excellent
00:33:13.100
manager can save many more souls over the course of a career than a heart surgeon can. And what I mean
00:33:21.100
by that is the real role of the leader is to, in fact, develop people, to enhance the ability today,
00:33:30.480
their capability for tomorrow. And again, I get back to that second grade teacher. The second grade
00:33:35.980
teacher is in the human development business. And so is the first line supervisor. In fact, in the book,
00:33:43.020
I say, first of all, I have a total separate chapter on first line supervisors. And in I, and I say the
00:33:50.640
full set of first line supervisors is the number one asset in the organization. I use a military example
00:33:56.980
and my military example, I was in the Navy for four years. And my military example is if a regimental
00:34:04.620
commander lost all of his lieutenants and captains and majors, it would be very, very sad. If he lost his
00:34:17.120
sergeants, the game would be over. The sergeants run the army, the chief petty officers run the Navy.
00:34:24.320
And the stats are there. First line supervision is highly correlated with productivity, with employee
00:34:32.460
retention, with quality of products. And I, you know, there was this wonderful line. And so a first
00:34:40.280
line supervisor, and I was listening to a, to the acceptance speech when Robert Altman, the movie
00:34:46.020
director, won a Lifetime Academy Award. And I was writing it down because I, you know, didn't have a
00:34:52.060
transcript or anything. And Altman said, the role of the director is to create a space where people can
00:35:01.840
be better than they have before, better than they have ever dreamed of being. Now, I don't care what
00:35:10.460
anybody feels who is listening to this. I think that is the aspiration that a manager can have in that
00:35:17.760
manager. And I'm not talking CEOs of big companies. I'm talking smallish companies. That manager over a
00:35:24.340
10 or 15 year period can honest to gosh, change the life trajectory of hundreds, if not thousands of
00:35:34.580
people, you know, probably do a heck of a lot better job or more significant job than the average
00:35:40.580
clergyman. And I am just religious on this topic. And I think the topic is five times, 10 times more
00:35:49.160
important than the, in the past, because I think, I think business in the face of the technology change
00:35:55.860
has, and we've always had it, but times 10 has a moral responsibility. Your moral responsibility to
00:36:05.360
your employees is that if they worked for you for six months or six years, when they leave your
00:36:14.980
employment, they will be better prepared for tomorrow than they would have if they hadn't been
00:36:21.940
with you. I love that. I love that. I think I'm just, I'm, I'm, you know, so 36 years ago, we wrote in
00:36:28.720
search of excellence. Now I've written the X. I am furious about this stuff. I am angrier and more
00:36:34.720
energetic. You know, I don't care if I am 200 years old because now we got to do it. We've got to develop
00:36:40.580
people. There's a moral responsibility to develop people. You know, I, I, I start my presentations and I'm
00:36:47.980
reading to you the text of a slide. There is no excuse for not making any organization of any size in any
00:36:57.740
business, a great place to work. And I would end not on the slide with, there is no excuse for not
00:37:05.440
having your seven person subset of a training department, your 12 person mechanics area and
00:37:14.460
your car dealership, your eight person, uh, appliance repair company that services homes within probably a
00:37:25.160
10 mile radius. Just no excuse for not making them great places to work where people are growing.
00:37:30.940
Right. And because I mean, people spend like most of their life at work.
00:37:34.080
Yeah. Yeah. That is so powerful. What you just said, look, I'm, I am thrilled that you love your
00:37:41.380
children and spend time with your family. That's not the point. The point is that unless you were born
00:37:47.920
with a silver spoon, statistically speaking, you will spend a higher share of your life at work
00:37:59.780
than doing anything else. And then when I use language that might be slightly inappropriate,
00:38:04.780
what I say is if you piss away your work life, you have pissed away your life. And statistically,
00:38:11.880
I'm right. Because as you just said, that's where we spend most of our time. You know, not if daddy
00:38:18.040
had $5 million or what have you, but I love my family. I love my kids. I love my grandkids. I want
00:38:23.440
to spend as much time with them as possible. But if I wasn't born rich, I'm going to spend more time at
00:38:28.160
work. And oh, how sad you're throwing your life away. Right. So I love that idea. If you're a manager,
00:38:35.120
knowing that it's like, what can I do to make these, this person's life, not just like their work,
00:38:39.940
but like their life better. Absolutely. And you know, the other way I put it,
00:38:44.340
and I will not use the language that I use in the book, is if you work your one butt off,
00:38:51.400
helping the 10 people who work for you get better, they will work their butts off,
00:38:57.920
making you more successful. So it's also selfish. Right, right. Yeah. That's that phrase,
00:39:02.900
you know, people don't leave companies, they leave managers. Yeah. I just, I thought that was,
00:39:06.760
that's fantastic. And that comes out of a, you know, really, that's hard research,
00:39:11.360
not just a throwaway line that some management guru came up with.
00:39:15.500
Yeah. Well, Tom, there's so much more we could talk about, but I love the points we hit in this
00:39:19.860
podcast. The thing that's going to separate you from the competition and be able to allow you to
00:39:24.520
compete with computers, robots, technology is that human stuff. Absolutely. I love that.
00:39:30.540
Yeah. I mean, at least, at the very least, if you focus on that, you'll feel good about yourself.
00:39:34.960
You know, I, I'm an old guy and I said, my standard in life is, can I walk past a mirror
00:39:41.340
without barfing? That's a good standard to have. Yeah. And you know, I'm, I'm, I'm not a very
00:39:47.140
religious person, but I really do think that we are here, whether you believe in God or whether you
00:39:53.720
are an atheist, we are here to help other people, members of our family, extended family. And the other
00:40:00.400
part of it is business also has an incredible responsibility to the communities it's parts of.
00:40:06.280
And so I, I'm not religious. I do buy that, that Altman quote about help people become more than
00:40:13.180
they've been before, more than they've ever dreamed of being. Boy, doesn't that feel good?
00:40:16.640
Wouldn't that feel good? No, for sure. Well, Tom, where can people go to learn more about the book
00:40:21.140
and your work? Well, they obviously any of the sites that allow you to buy books, and I'm not
00:40:28.000
going to mention any names because I'm not going to single anybody out. I'm delighted with whomever
00:40:33.440
sells them, but Tom Peters.com among many other things says the PowerPoint slides off of every
00:40:44.780
presentation I've given in the last 15 years. And more recently, we've got several annotated
00:40:51.160
presentations that are meant to be companions to the book. And they amplify, they're more like the
00:40:59.540
conversation that you and I scream a little bit louder. And every, you know, there is absolutely
00:41:05.080
nothing in our website to the best of my knowledge that you have to pay a penny for. So it's all there,
00:41:10.020
all yours. And in fact, I will consider it a good day when you steal something from me. That's why
00:41:16.540
I'm here, to be stolen from. That's right. It's all about helping people, right? It comes back to
00:41:20.400
that. Well, Tom, thank you for your time. It's been a pleasure. It has been my pleasure. Thanks so much.
00:41:24.820
My guest name is Tom Peters. His new book is The Excellence Dividend. It's available on
00:41:28.380
amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Also check out his site, tompeters.com, where you find more
00:41:33.260
information about his work as well as some free resources there. Also check out our show notes at
00:41:36.960
aom.is slash excellencedividend. We'll find links to resources where we can delve deeper into this
00:41:41.980
topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and
00:41:58.380
advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And if you enjoyed the
00:42:02.300
podcast, you've gotten something out of it. Appreciate you take one minute to give us a review on iTunes or
00:42:06.400
Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, please consider, well, first, thank
00:42:10.280
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00:42:14.060
something out of it. As always, thank you for your continued support. Until next time, this is Brad