Tom Peters

Seminar2004

NEW SLIDES

09.28.04

“To win this race, Kerry needs to stop focusing on Election Day and start

thinking about his would-be presidency’s last day. What does he want his legacy to be? When sixth-graders in the year 2108 read about the Kerry presidency, what does he want the one or two sentences that

accompany his photo to say?” —Kenneth Baer/Washington Post/092604

Narrowcast World …

Infomercials … $256 billion Quantity … 250,000 per month (U.S. & Canada) Growth rate … 10% p.a. Purchases … $91 billion Price … $50/30-minutes to $15,000/30 min Source: Washington Post/09.26.04

60,000

600/200

168/18,500/51,000

60,000*

*New factories in China opened by foreigners/2000-2003/

Edward Gresser, Progressive Policy Institute/Wall Street Journal 09.27.04

Ex2004:Excellence

Found!Tom Peters

09.24.2004

And the Winner is …

1. Audacity of Vision2. Innovation/R&D/Design3. Talent Acquisition & Development4. Resultant “Experience”5. Strategic Alliances6. Operations7. Financial Management8. Overall/Sustaining Excellence9. “Wow!”

Cirque du Soleil!

Cirque du Soleil: Talent (12 full-time

scouts, database of 20,000). R&D (40% of

profits; 2X avg corp). Controls (shows are profit centers; partners like Disney offset costs;

$100M on $500M). Scarcity builds buzz/brand (1 new show per year. “People tell me we’re leaving money on the table by not duplicating our shows. They’re right.”—Daniel

Lamarre, president).Source: “The Phantasmagoria Factory”/Business 2.0/1-2.2004

Ex2004

Cirque du Soleil

Infosys

Build-A-Bear

Oceanic Aspirations …

“By making the Global Delivery Model both legitimate and mainstream, we have brought the battle to our territory. That is, after all, the purpose of

strategy. We have become the leaders, and incumbents [IBM, Accenture] are followers, forever playing catch-up. … However, creating a new business

innovation is not enough for rules to be changed. The innovation must impact clients, competitors, investors, and society. We have seen all this in

spades. Clients have embraced the model and are demanding it in even greater measure. The acuteness of their circumstance, coupled with the capability and value of our solution, has made the choice not a choice.

Competitors have been dragged kicking and screaming to replicate what we do. They face trauma and disruption, but the game has changed forever. Investors have grasped that this is not a passing fancy, but a potential

restructuring of the way the world operates and how value will be created in the future.”

—Narayana Murthy, chairman’s letter, Infosys Annual Report 2003

Build-A-Bear

--1997 to 2004: $0 to $300M

--Maxine Clark/CEO (25 yrs May Dept Stores)

--Build-A-Bear Workshops

--Engagement! (“Where Best Friends Are Made”)

--Theater!

--http://www.buildabear.com/buildaparty

Best Web Site?

buildabear.com

09.21.04

The Hunch of a Lifetime: An Emergent (Market) Nexus

I have a sense/hunch there’s an interesting nexus among several of the ideas about New Market Realities that I promote … namely Women-Boomers-Wellness-Green-Intangibles. Each one drives the Fundamental (Traditional) Economic Value Proposition toward the “softer side”: From facts- & figures-obsessed males toward relationship-oriented Women. From goods-driven youth toward “experiences”-craving Boomers. From quick-fix & pill-popping “healthcare” toward a holistically inclined “Wellness Revolution.” From mindless exploitation of the Earth’s resources toward increased awareness of the fragility and preciousness of our Environment. From “goods” and “services” toward Design- & Creativity-rich Intangibles-Experiences-Dreams Fulfilled. This so-called “softer side”—as the disparate likes of IBM’s Sam Palmisano and Harley-Davidson’s Rich Teerlink teach us—is now & increasingly “where the loot is,” damn near all the loot. That is, the “softer side” has become the Prime Driver of tomorrow’s “hard” economic value. Furthermore, each of the Five Key Ideas (Women-Boomers-Wellness-Green-Intangibles) feeds off and complements the other four. Dare I use the word “synergy”? Perhaps. (Or: Of course!) I can imagine an enterprise defining its raison d’etre in terms of these Five Complementary Key Ideas. (HINT: DAMN FEW DO TODAY.)

An Emergent Nexus

Men …………………………….……………….... WomenYouth ………………………………… Boomers/Geezers“Fix It”Healthcare………………... Wellness/PreventionExploit-the-Earth ……...... Preserve/Cherish the PlanetTangibles ……………………………………… Intangibles

Ye gads: “Thomas Stanley has not only found no correlation between success in school and an

ability to accumulate wealth, he’s actually found a negative correlation. ‘It seems that school-

related evaluations are poor predictors of economic success,’ Stanley concluded. What did predict success was a willingness to take risks.

Yet the success-failure standards of most schools penalized risk takers. Most educational

systems reward those who play it safe. As a result, those who do well in school find it hard to

take risks later on.”Richard Farson & Ralph Keyes, Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins

09.17.04

“We’re now entering a new phase of business where the group will be a

franchising and management company where brand management is central.”

—David Webster, Chairman, InterContinental Hotels Group

“InterContinental will now have far more to do with brand ownership than

hotel ownership.” —James Dawson of Charles Stanley

(brokerage)

Source: International Herald Tribune, 09.16, on the sacking of CEO Richard North, whose entire background is in finance

“What I am really wanting to do is a design school, to teach the sensibility that

goes into the building of a business into a company with

a point of view.” —Ralph Lauren, International Herald Tribune/09.16.2004

“A focus on cost-cutting and efficiency has helped many

organizations weather the downturn, but this approach will ultimately render them obsolete. Only the

constant pursuit of innovation can ensure long-term success.” —Daniel Muzyka,

Dean, Sauder School of Business, Univ of British Columbia (FT/09.17.04)

“A man can stand anything except a

succession of ordinary days”

—Goethe

“[At Pfizer, Merck, Unilever, Nestle] and other companies, the standard stage-gate approach to

product development has become ingrained that it has driven out the very innovative thinking that it was designed to encourage. And while the returns on

innovation effort appear to be falling for large companies, it is often the unheralded start-up or new entrant that comes up with the latest hit product. …

Thus, Coca-Cola, once celebrated for its innovation and vision, has been late to every new trend in the drinks

industry in the past decade, from sports drinks to bottled water.” —Julian Birkenshaw, Rick Delbridge & John Bessant,

“A Leap into the Unknown,” FT/09.17.04

On Great Innovation Leaps

“Tune into weak signals inside the firm … A good place to look for new ideas is distant

foreign subsidiaries, smaller business units and affiliated companies that the company does not even wholly own. For example, Diageo’s highly successful Smirnoff Ice originated in Australia as Stolichnaya before it was picked up by the corporate marketing department as a product

with global potential.” —Julian Birkenshaw, Rick Delbridge & John Bessant, “A Leap into the Unknown,” FT/09.17.04

09.13.04

“About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 to do the job I get paid $67,300

for. He is happy to have the work. I am happy that I only have to work about 90 minutes per day (I still have to attend meetings myself, and I spend a few minutes

every day talking code with my Indian counterpart.) The rest of my time my employer thinks I’m telecommuting.

They are happy to let me telecommute because my output is higher than most of my coworkers. Now I’m considering getting a second job and doing the same

thing with it. That may be pushing my luck though. The extra money would be nice, but that could push my

workday over five hours.” —from posting at Slashdot (02.04.04), reported by Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind

“Most of what I see is elimination

of the middle people.” —Lee Scott, CEO, Wal*Mart, on

the relentless drive to even further reduce costs (Christmas tree lights at Asda v. Wal*Mart USA: $21 v $6, same factory)

“For a woman, speech has a clear purpose: to build relationships and make friends—not to solve

problems. A woman can spend two weeks on vacation with her girlfriend and, when she returns home,

telephone the same girlfriend and talk for another two hours. For a man, not talking is perfectly natural. For

men, to talk is to relate the facts. Men see the telephone as a communication tool for relaying facts and information to other people, but a woman sees it

as a means of bonding.” —Allan Pease & Barbara Pease, Why Men Can Only Do One Thing at a Time and Women Never Stop Talking

How many men does it take to change a roll of toilet paper?

It’s unknown. It’s never happened.

Source: Allan Pease & Barbara Pease, Why Men Can Only Do One Thing at a Time and Women Never Stop Talking

“Society today is determined to believe that men and women possess

the same skills, aptitudes and potentials—just as science, ironically,

is beginning to prove that we are completely different. —Allan Pease & Barbara

Pease, Why Men Can Only Do One Thing at a Time and Women Never Stop Talking

“The latest mobiles, on sale for $200 to $300 in Japan, function as wallets, letting people pay

their utility bills or buy movie tickets by putting their handset near a reader. … New I-mode

phones also have a bar-code-reading camera that people can point at the bar code on a

magazine or poster, taking them straight to the Website with updated and detailed information on, say, a concert or a discount sale.” —“Super

Phone: Kei-Ichi Enoki, a founding father of the mobile Web, is moving beyond email and games to make the phone a remote

control for living” (Forbes Global/09.20.2004)

“Never let reality get in the way of

imagination” —Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Teheran

(from Audi’s “Never Follow” Website)

“Learn not to be

careful”

—Photographer Diane Arbus to her students (Careful = “The sidelines,” per Harriet Rubin in The Princessa)

“Never bite off less than

you can chew” —Freddy Adu, teenage soccer phenom (from Audi’s

“Never Follow” Website)

Self-serve Nation!

Radisson: check-in via Web up to 1-week prior to arrival

Holiday Inn: computer menu, also keeps track bill and a running total of calories

and carbs

Hilton: roaming check-in clerks, WiFi-enabled

Source: USA Today/08.31.04

“We don’t see Pele’s work as destruction but as

cleansing. She’s a creator. When she comes through she wipes the land clean and leaves us new fertile

ground.” —Keola Hanoa, on the Big Island’s volcanoes (National Geographic/10.04)

“When the Silk Road Gets Paved”/Forbes Global/09.04

Express highways: 168 miles in ’89 … 18,500 in ’03 … 51,000 in ’08 (v. U.S.

Interstate: 46,500)

Implications: $200M Intel plant in Chengdu (pop. 9.9M); 1/3rd Shanghai

wage rate

International Herald Tribune

/09.13.2004: P1/600 foreign R&D labs in China, 200 new

per year

New Delhi/09.13.2004/The Economic Times

P1: “Airport Traffic Racks Up 26% Growth in 4 Months”

P1: “EMPLOYABLE GRADUATES IN DEMAND” (“The Business Process Outsourcing sector is facing a roadblock. …BPO companies are struggling to hire new employees in sufficient numbers. …”)

P11: “Tourist Arrivals Surge 26% in Lean Apr-Aug”

BLS/Payroll Survey: 500K since 11.01

BLS/Household Survey: 3.25M since 11.01

“In other words, millions of people are not reporting to work. They are

starting businesses. … Traditional payroll jobs aren’t coming back in in

big numbers.” —Rich Karlgaard, Publisher, Forbes (09.20.04)