The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025


#427： The Excellence Dividend


Episode Stats

Length

42 minutes

Words per Minute

166.35431

Word Count

7,042

Sentence Count

455

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

5


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 This episode of the Art of Manliness podcast is brought to you by Huckberry. Huckberry is my
00:00:03.540 favorite place to shop online. Everything from clothing, they got stuff for your everyday carry,
00:00:08.120 camping gear, things for your house like furniture and even like art. You name it,
00:00:12.000 they've got it and they handpick all this stuff, the feature in their store. Go check it out at
00:00:16.060 huckberry.com. And if you want to see some of the things I've purchased from Huckberry over the
00:00:19.540 years, go to aom.is slash aomhuck. And if it's your first time purchasing, use code art15 at
00:00:26.660 checkout and you'll save 15% off your first purchase. Again, aom.is slash aomhuck and then
00:00:32.000 code art15 to save 15% off your first purchase. This episode of the Art of Manliness podcast is
00:00:36.840 brought to you by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is more than just another greens product. It's been
00:00:41.120 developed over 10 years by doctors and nutritionists. It's the most complete whole food supplement
00:00:44.760 available with 75 ingredients working together to help with five different areas of health.
00:00:48.380 Once it was like having 11 supplements in one. And now as a special deal for my listeners,
00:00:52.960 you can get 20 free travel packs valued at $99 with your first purchase when you go to
00:00:57.060 athleticgreens.com slash manliness. Again, athleticgreens.com slash manliness to claim
00:01:01.840 your special offer today. Don't miss this. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the
00:01:20.520 Art of Manliness podcast. In today's hyper competitive market in which technology is
00:01:24.800 eating jobs, what sets the successful companies and workers apart from the ones that flounder?
00:01:29.320 My guest today argues it could be something as little as saying hello and helping an old lady
00:01:33.020 with her wheelchair. His name is Tom Peters and he's a business expert and the author of several
00:01:36.460 books on professional success. His latest is called The Excellence Dividend, meaning the tech
00:01:40.360 tied with work that wows and jobs that last. Today on the show, Tom and I discuss why the human
00:01:44.520 touch and striving for excellence is what will give companies and workers an advantage in today's
00:01:48.760 market. Tom shares why execution beats strategy in business and in life, how companies can develop
00:01:53.600 a culture of excellence and why the businesses that put customers first win in the long run.
00:01:58.480 Tom then makes the impassioned case that business managers who see themselves as coaches of excellence
00:02:02.640 and that they have more of an impact on the lives of people than we give them credit for.
00:02:06.200 After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash excellence dividend, all one word.
00:02:18.760 All right, Tom Peters, welcome to the show.
00:02:31.560 It is a pleasure to be with you, Brett.
00:02:33.580 So you got a new book out, The Excellence Dividend, meaning the tech tied with work that
00:02:38.000 wows and jobs that last. You published a book or co-authored a book back in, I was in 82, correct?
00:02:44.420 That's correct.
00:02:44.880 That was the year I was born. Not to make you-
00:02:47.780 I am not going to respond to that.
00:02:49.560 Not to make you feel old. But it was In Search of Excellence. For those who aren't familiar with
00:02:55.200 that book, what was the main thesis of it? And after that, how was the excellence dividend sort
00:03:01.380 of a continuation of that thesis? Or maybe it's different.
00:03:03.920 I'll do this as quickly as I can. The Americans came out of World War II in relatively good shape.
00:03:10.900 No bombed landscape, et cetera, et cetera. We ruled the world. And starting in the 70s,
00:03:19.100 the Japanese started to wake up and send products over. And they were better products. And we bought
00:03:28.380 them. And it was shipping. It was steel. And that's one thing. But then suddenly it was automobiles.
00:03:33.780 And automobiles are sort of what Americans stand for. And the Japanese magic was, in simple
00:03:41.300 terms, cars that work. And a couple of years, three years before In Search of Excellence, a
00:03:48.900 couple of Harvard Business School professors had written an article in the Harvard Business
00:03:53.480 Review. And it was called Managing Our Way to Economic Decline. And they said, and it's the
00:04:01.100 same words we frequently hear today about business schools, they said, we're spending too much time
00:04:06.300 about finance and marketing. We're not spending enough time paying attention to the people who
00:04:11.260 actually build the automobiles. And so that was the context into which the book came. When Bob
00:04:19.360 Waterman and I started our research on In Search of Excellence, the thesis was that criticisms of
00:04:25.400 American management were very accurate. But there were still some people who were doing it incredibly
00:04:30.820 well. And companies like 3M, companies like Hewlett Packard, a very much smaller Hewlett Packard at the
00:04:38.780 time, and so on. And so we wrote about the good guys. And as to the word excellence, it really has, for me,
00:04:45.500 a funny kind of history. I had a presentation to give at McKinsey, and I hadn't written it. But I did have
00:04:53.240 to go to the San Francisco Ballet with my wife. And it was a magnificent performance. And I'm not sure
00:04:59.620 what happened next, but I was starting to work on the presentation. And I thought, isn't it weird?
00:05:05.380 We use the word excellence with ballet, with theater, with football, with baseball, with basketball,
00:05:11.880 with swimming. We never use the word excellence and business together, which is insane, because of
00:05:20.380 a business of two people or 2,000 people is a collection of human beings attempting to get
00:05:27.240 something done useful. And so why the hell can't you use the words business and excellence in the
00:05:33.500 same sentence? And it was off to the races after that. I mean, there was a lot of steps in between.
00:05:39.500 Fundamentally, that's where the word came from. And my passion for excellence, to steal my own second
00:05:45.000 book title, has not only diminished, but it's increased. And the reason this book came about
00:05:52.200 is my belief that excellence and the intention of excellence are, in fact, by far the best way,
00:06:01.480 I hate to use the word defend ourselves, the best way to deal with this tsunami of technology that's
00:06:08.300 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
00:06:15.500 BWI to Washington and in the morning and flying on Southwest, which is my habit whenever I have the
00:06:24.100 chance. Pilots for my plane landed several gates down and they came in late and they were hustling,
00:06:32.540 to put it mildly, to get to my gate and to get onto their plane. And of course, getting out on time
00:06:38.940 is, you know, is a religion. So they're hustling toward the gate. The gate was the gate that you've seen
00:06:46.300 a hundred times and I've seen a thousand times. There were a half a dozen wheelchairs there. So the pilot who
00:06:52.920 is under pressure, heading for the gate, turns to the woman in the first wheelchair and says, would you mind
00:07:00.800 if I took you down the jetway? I figure I have 7,500 flight legs to my credit. And it was the first
00:07:10.380 time I had ever seen anything like that in my life. And it's little human stuff like that, that you
00:07:17.720 remember, that sticks in your mind for days, for years, you know, for decades. I remember when I told
00:07:23.840 that story to speech recently, some guy came up to me afterwards and he said, he said, you know,
00:07:28.360 I've never even seen a pilot look at a passenger before they went down the jetway. But that kind
00:07:34.680 of story multiplied by a thousand, I believe will, I believe A is not going to be at least in the short
00:07:42.700 term copied by artificial intelligence. And B is the sort of memorable experience that will allow us to
00:07:50.900 succeed and in fact find excellence in 2018 as much as was the case back in 82. That's a long-winded
00:07:59.880 answer to your question for which I apologize. No, no, that's perfect. So yeah, the first,
00:08:04.200 so back in 82, the competition was the Japanese. Right. And now it's robots, artificial intelligence,
00:08:12.220 and the way we can combat that. Yeah, I mean, that's obviously a gross oversimplification.
00:08:16.180 Exactly. In various industries, we're getting nailed by the Chinese. That's funny. A statistic
00:08:22.080 that I've got in the book is we assume that American workers are losing their job to Chinese
00:08:28.780 workers. Well, the real reality is over the course of the last, I think it's 15 or 20 years,
00:08:34.520 the Chinese have lost 25 million manufacturing jobs or a third of their entire manufacturing
00:08:43.460 population. You know, the guys who make the Apple computer, Foxconn, you know, I saw a headline a
00:08:48.740 couple of years ago, and this also is in the book, Foxconn placed an order for their production lines
00:08:56.360 for 1 million robots. So this ain't an American story. It's an American story of our competitors
00:09:05.040 in China and so on. So where we can differentiate ourselves from robots is doing the human stuff that
00:09:11.220 robots can't do, showing empathy, doing service, things like that. That's where you try to focus
00:09:16.920 on. Yeah. And, you know, let's empathy, service, and so on, but let's stick with hard manufacturing.
00:09:22.860 What in the heck is Apple other than an amazing collection of human touches? You know, we talk
00:09:29.160 about speed, speed, speed. Everybody's got to get their product out on time and so on. I don't think
00:09:34.300 Steve Jobs ever got, he not only never got a product out on time, but he didn't come with
00:09:39.980 a year or two of getting a product out in time. And why? Because he was working on, oh, those hundreds
00:09:46.660 and thousands of tiny details that made the Apple product today to a significant degree and dramatically
00:09:54.340 then different. There's this wonderful line I came across by Steve Jobs' wife, and she was talking
00:10:02.800 about Steve and Johnny Ive, who was the head of design. And listen to this sentence carefully.
00:10:09.540 It's really so cool. She said, Steve and Johnny would discuss corners, C-O-R-N-E-R-S, for hours on end.
00:10:19.740 And why has Apple got the market cap it has today? And the answer is it's got better corners. But the
00:10:25.540 attention to corners in a manufacturing product, to me, is exactly analogous to the pilot
00:10:32.480 who takes the lady in the wheelchair down the jetway. And so it's hard products, soft products,
00:10:39.880 it's services, it's across the board. So the first section of your book is about execution.
00:10:46.460 I thought it was interesting. That was the primary focus because a lot of times when people think about
00:10:50.940 business or think about starting a business, whether you're a small-time entrepreneur or you're
00:10:54.820 a bigger guy, you think about strategy. You got to come up with a plan. But you said that that might
00:11:00.720 actually hurt you in the long run if you focus on strategy first and not execution.
00:11:05.660 Well, I think we can dramatically overdo the strategy thing. Jack Welsh, who was everybody
00:11:12.300 at least for 20 years, once said, he said, what is strategy? He said, strategy is you pick a general
00:11:19.580 direction and then you implement like hell. And I knew Welsh and I knew Welsh's GE. And I will guarantee
00:11:25.900 you that 95 percent of the action at General Electric was, in fact, on the implementation
00:11:32.660 end of stuff. I'll tell you the little story that we start the book with and which I've started
00:11:38.360 virtually every presentation for the last half dozen years. The great hotelier Conrad Hilton was
00:11:45.140 having his career celebrated at some big gala. People got up and told various stories and finally
00:11:51.200 someone ushered Mr. Hilton up to the podium and asked, they said, Mr. Hilton, will you share
00:11:59.620 some of your business secrets with us? And Hilton goes up to the podium, looks out at the audience
00:12:07.240 of grand people and says, remember to tuck the shower curtain into the bathtub. And with that,
00:12:15.140 he turns and walks off the stage. And the logic behind this is, look, I come to your hotel because
00:12:23.240 of location, location, location, and because you hired this Swiss architect and it's gorgeous.
00:12:31.020 But every business person loses money on the first transaction and makes their money on transaction
00:12:37.720 two through 22. And the number of times that they recommend through social media or what have you,
00:12:44.760 somebody else. I come to your hotel because of where it is. I come back to your hotel because
00:12:50.260 of the shower curtains. And, you know, that's fundamentally the game. The vice chairman of
00:12:56.120 GE and Welsh's time and subsequently the head of Allied Signal and Allied was a guy by the name of
00:13:02.380 Larry Bossidy. And I'm going to read you a Bossidy quote. Execution is the job of the business
00:13:09.020 leader. That's fine. Here's the one to pay attention to. The first thing I look for in a job
00:13:16.300 candidate are energy and enthusiasm for execution. Does the candidate talk about the thrill of getting
00:13:23.880 things done? And listen to the next clause, the thrill of getting things done, or does she keep
00:13:29.380 wandering back to strategy and philosophy? Does she detail the obstacles that had to be overcome,
00:13:36.160 the roles played by the people assigned, and so on? And I am not arguing against strategy. I'm just
00:13:43.740 saying the essence of life and the essence of success. You know, in business is, in fact, preparation,
00:13:51.920 practice, and execution. And I will go to my grave screaming that at the top of my lungs.
00:13:57.940 Yeah. And I was reading that. I thought that, you know, it wasn't just applicable for business,
00:14:01.100 but also just life in general. We have a lot of younger guys who listen to the podcast and read
00:14:06.780 the site, and they're always asking for advice. They're like, you know, what should I do with my
00:14:10.660 life? And my general advice is, like, just do something. Because I think a lot of guys, they
00:14:13.920 get stuck in just trying to plan out the next 20 years of their life. And I'm like, look, buddy,
00:14:18.600 it's not going to go according to plan, but you just got to start going in general directions,
00:14:22.160 and things will start opening up. Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things when I give advice
00:14:28.100 like that, you know, to people who are relatively junior, is I say one of the great success routes
00:14:35.460 take some unbelievably crappy assignment and turn it into excellence. You know, some, your group of 30
00:14:43.220 people are going to have a Memorial Day picnic. Nobody wants to manage the damn Memorial Day picnic.
00:14:49.600 And so bright-eyed and bushy tail, you say, I'll do this. And you turn that picnic into a circus
00:14:55.780 where people have fun, and so on. You don't think that's going to get noticed? And it's, you know,
00:15:01.100 it's a thousand strategies like that of, you know, it's that word excellence, which is still stuck in
00:15:06.360 my head 35 years after the book. But make that little thing that other people say, yeah, turn it into
00:15:13.360 excellent. So, I mean, how do you, as a, say, a manager or a business owner,
00:15:18.980 help develop this culture of excellence? Is it something that you can purposely and intentionally
00:15:24.280 inculcate? Or is it, do you have to find candidates first to have those attributes and then that will
00:15:30.000 take care of itself? Well, obviously it's both, but I do believe that, you know, as I say in the book
00:15:37.320 somewhere, excellence is not a long-term aspiration or a hill to climb. Excellence is the next five minutes,
00:15:45.800 that next act. Thomas Watson was the founder of the corporation. And somebody asked him at one point,
00:15:55.140 this was when IBM was at the top of the game for everybody in the world. And they, they said,
00:15:59.900 Mr. Watson, how long does it take to achieve excellence? And he said, one minute. And, you know,
00:16:07.840 whoever it was at, huh? And he said, the way excellence is to promise yourself that you will
00:16:14.480 never again do anything, no matter how small that isn't excellent. And so, you know, that's the story,
00:16:20.900 but I believe, you know, it's that old one-liner that's tiresome, except that it happens to be
00:16:25.980 accurate, which is called walk the talk. You know, when you're dealing with communications to a client or
00:16:33.740 what have you, every single item that comes out of your part of the organization will be startlingly
00:16:41.220 good. And, and it's just, you know, excellence is lived one minute at a time. I mean, think about it.
00:16:47.740 I don't know whether you're a sports fan or not, but I happened to live in the San Francisco Bay area
00:16:53.340 when the 49ers were at the top of their game. And Bill Walsh was the coach of the 49ers for 10 years.
00:16:59.800 And he wrote a book with the world's best title. And the title was called the score takes care of
00:17:07.960 itself. And he said, the whole focus was on the practice was on making a culture of professionalism
00:17:16.300 in the organization. And if you get that stuff, right, then the odds go way up that at the end
00:17:22.640 of the ball game, you will have scored more points than the other guy. So what skills, I mean,
00:17:28.920 because you, can we, let me, sorry, I didn't finish up because the way you asked the question
00:17:33.980 is you said, or should we find it coming in? And the answer is absolutely. You know, my answer is
00:17:41.100 very boring. Both. Remember the little story that I mentioned a couple of minutes, the pilot who took
00:17:47.200 the, took the lady in the wheelchair down the jetway. Well, why does that happen? Well, it happens
00:17:52.780 because of Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines approach to life, et cetera, et cetera.
00:17:57.860 But Colleen Barrett, who was their president, I think she started out as a secretary, actually.
00:18:05.080 Somebody asked her kind of the question you asked me. And she said, we hire for listening, caring,
00:18:14.000 smiling, saying thank you, and being warm. And we demand those attributes in mechanics and pilots
00:18:22.280 in flight attendants or the people at the front desk. So, and there's another guy, heads a, heads a,
00:18:27.900 a pharmaceutical company, for God's sakes, where you don't think of sweetness and light in general.
00:18:33.220 And it's a, it's not, it's beyond startup, but it's not one of the giants. And somebody asked him
00:18:38.520 the question that you asked me, and he said, we only hire nice people. And he said, you know,
00:18:46.060 the reality is even in the high level technical jobs, like some, you know, PhD microbiologist,
00:18:52.600 he said, there are a lot of PhD microbiologists around actually don't hire the jerks. And his
00:19:00.140 situation, I mean, it's wonderful. You know, I could give you two other examples like that,
00:19:05.000 but the language would be totally inappropriate. A guy who heads a special effects company in the
00:19:10.960 movie world who said, never hire. And the word begins with a, and, and so on. But this pharmaceutical
00:19:17.980 guy's amazing. He said, look, I interview you, you have this incredible degree from MIT or Berkeley
00:19:23.260 or heaven alone knows where, and I would give my left and right arms to have you on our staff.
00:19:29.240 But after my conversation with you, you have to do what we call, this is him saying, we,
00:19:36.660 you've got to run the gauntlet. And that gauntlet is a dozen short interviews with receptionists,
00:19:43.940 with secretaries, with low level people in the finance department. And any single one of those
00:19:50.640 people can in fact, stop you from getting the job if they don't think you're the kind of person who
00:19:57.200 will fit our culture. And that is strong language in a very unexpected place.
00:20:02.240 Yeah. I mean, so this goes, yeah, I like that idea that for an employee, the way to differentiate
00:20:07.680 yourself, because everyone probably has a degree, right? If you're going for a job that has a minimum
00:20:11.340 requirement for, you know, for specialties or knowledge, lots of people have that. The thing
00:20:16.560 that's going to separate yours from everyone else is this, again, those soft human skills,
00:20:21.680 right? We're going back to that.
00:20:23.200 Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, a la the example of the pharmaceutical company, you know, you can say,
00:20:28.320 well, an airline is a service business, but I'm in the hard nose business. Well, there ain't nothing
00:20:33.080 harder than pharmaceuticals. And so this human touch and specialness that gets things done,
00:20:39.480 you know, I'm arguing, well, let me let me give you another example, which is really mind blowing to
00:20:44.280 me. Unfortunately, it's not in the book, because I came across it after the fact. So think of the soft
00:20:51.180 traits now, and I'm going to read this, it's a paragraph. Project Oxygen data from founding in
00:20:58.340 1998 to 2013, shocked everyone at Google by concluding that among the eight most important
00:21:08.140 of Google's top employees, STEM, the almighty STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics,
00:21:14.900 STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of the top employees at Google
00:21:24.220 are all soft skills, being a good coach, communicating and listening well, possessing insights into others,
00:21:31.100 including others with different values and points of view, having empathy toward and being supportive
00:21:35.280 of one's colleagues, being a good critical thinker and problem solver, and being able to make connections
00:21:40.740 across complex ideas. So I, I love the idea that, you know, I don't know what, but I would say in terms
00:21:46.580 of intellect, I would say that Google is probably the toughest company around. And yet they find that
00:21:52.780 the people who do the best work are, you know, got decent STEM background, I'm sure, but are the people
00:21:59.180 who have the soft skills and back to our original execution conversation, who get things done. And they even
00:22:05.900 found in some further work that the most creative teams, it's, it's funny, they, they categorize their
00:22:11.620 employees, which I don't think is a great idea, but that's another discussion into A players and B players
00:22:18.240 and the B player teams outperform the A player teams and they outperform the A player teams again,
00:22:27.640 because of all these soft skills of, of sharing information and so on. And you end up with more
00:22:33.720 creative projects. We're going to take a quick break for your words, more sponsors, Jeremy here,
00:22:37.840 producer for the AOM podcast support for today's show comes from Starbucks double shot, a chilled
00:22:42.860 coffee energy drink that gives you the gusto to go from point A to point done as a husband, dad to two
00:22:48.260 young kids, podcast producer, I need a lot of energy to not just survive my day, but really own it.
00:22:53.640 And while I'm normally a hot coffee guy on those blazing summer days, the last thing I want is a
00:22:58.440 steaming hot beverage. Plus, I don't like your standard energy drinks that are loaded with sugar,
00:23:02.940 always have weird off-putting flavors. So what's a busy guy to do? Enter the Starbucks double shot
00:23:07.940 starts with bold Starbucks coffee and is blended with milk for a smooth, creamy, truly delicious
00:23:13.020 flavor. It's then enhanced with ginseng, guarana, and B vitamins to give you that little extra oomph.
00:23:18.080 Starbucks double shot comes in six delicious flavors, mocha, vanilla, hazelnut, white chocolate,
00:23:23.180 Mexican mocha, and coffee. With that last one being my personal favorite Starbucks double shot,
00:23:27.780 it's energy to do things you actually do. Find it in your local convenience store.
00:23:31.900 Well, thank you, Jeremy. And this episode is also brought to you in part by Saks Underwear.
00:23:36.260 Saks Underwear is the underwear of the future, and they recently released their new undercover
00:23:39.880 collection. The undercover collection from Saks Underwear is made of super soft cotton modal,
00:23:43.920 keeping you cool no matter what. Fabric's breathable, moisture wicking, resistant odor.
00:23:47.820 There's nothing else out there like it. And we all know Saks is the only men's underwear that's
00:23:51.840 actually designed with our anatomy in mind with the revolutionary ballpark pouch. Got these
00:23:55.720 internal mesh panels that keeps everything in place and separate. So no more sticking,
00:23:59.300 no more chafing. It's fantastic. What's nice, another nice thing about the undercover collection,
00:24:03.520 they've got the course, the boxer brief, but they also have a widey tidy version. So if you're a
00:24:07.620 brief man, they got those as well. So check them out. Really comfortable. I love them, especially during
00:24:12.520 those hot summer workouts in the garage gym. Super nice. And we got a special offer for Art of
00:24:17.140 Manliness listeners. Here's what you do. Go to SaksUnderwear.com and use promo code AOM at checkout.
00:24:23.220 That's S-A-X-X, underwear.com. That's Saks with two X's. Use promo code AOM at checkout. You're going to get
00:24:29.000 $5 off plus free shipping on your first purchase. Again, SaksUnderwear.com, promo code AOM, $5 off plus
00:24:35.760 free shipping on your first purchase when you use that code. And now back to the show.
00:24:39.900 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
00:24:53.140 calls on time, provides excellent service, gives me updates on things, just those soft skills.
00:24:59.240 And then there's other people, they might be really knowledgeable and good what they do,
00:25:02.320 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.
00:27:22.640 Well, you know, it goes the whole way.
00:27:24.200 Right.
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.
00:28:13.060 Right. You gotta be a pro. Gotta be a pro.
00:28:15.120 Yeah.
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 you. And then please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think gets
00:42:14.060 something out of it. As always, thank you for your continued support. Until next time, this is Brad
00:42:17.920 McKay telling you to stay manly.