The Art of Manliness - #427： The Excellence Dividend

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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 1.00

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, 0.94

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 1.00

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. 0.99

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 0.99

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. 0.99

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 0.99

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, 0.99

00:18:52.600 he said, there are a lot of PhD microbiologists around actually don't hire the jerks. And his 0.99

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,

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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 0.93

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. 0.98

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, 0.66

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

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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.

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2018

#427： The Excellence Dividend

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