I watched a videocast today of Tom Peters talking about the need for businesses to focus on seeking and keeping Talent. Three key points I got were (a) make sure you have enough freaks/weirdos/eccentrics (read creative people) on your team (b) women are the managers of the future and (c) bow to the power of youth (they have the keys to the kingdom).
He has what some might consider a bombastic style of speaking that might be a little off putting at first but if you go with the flow his spiel is worth listening to.
Tom Peters has been in the consultant biz for a long time, his classic book In Search of Excellence
came out in 1982. Even though he's an old codger he has some fresh, radical, interesting, helpful and exciting ideas.You can get an idea of what he's talking about nowadays at his website, plus he has a lot of cool links on his blogroll, like this one to Dave Barry's Blog.
If you have Powerpoint you can view this presentation he gave this May at the
Snohomish County Business Excellence conference. There's a lot of slides (over a hundred) and a Powerpoint is not too great without the speaker but you can get a feel for what he's communicating. Some interesting quotes from the Powerpoint -
“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_______________________________
“The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind—computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”
Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind_______________________________
“Over the last decade the biggest employment gains came in occupations that rely on people skills and emotional intelligence and among jobs that require imagination and creativity. … Trying to preserve existing jobs will prove futile—trade and technology will transform the economy whether we like it or not. Americans will be better off if they strive to move up the hierarchy of human talents. That’s where our future lies.” —Michael Cox, Richard Alm and Nigel Holmes/“Where the Jobs Are”/NYT/05.13.2004_______________________________
“Ninety percent of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.” - Peter Drucker_______________________________
"To grow, companies need to break out of a vicious cycle of competitive benchmarking and imitation.” - W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, “Think for Yourself —Stop Copying a Rival,” Financial Times/08.11.03_______________________________
What do, Four Seasons and Motel 6 possibly have in common? Or Neiman-Marcus and Walmart? Or Nokia (bringing out new hardware every 30 days or so) and Nintendo (marketing the same Game Boy 14 years in a row)?
"The thing that all these companies have in common is that they have nothing in common. They are outliers. They’re on the fringes. Superfast or superslow. Very exclusive or very cheap. Extremely big or extremely small. The reason it’s so hard to follow the leader is this: The leader is the leader precisely because he did something remarkable. And that remarkable thing is now taken—so it’s no longer remarkable when you decide to do it.” —Seth Godin, Fast Company/02.2003_______________________________
“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” —General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff. U. S. Army_______________________________
"We have a ‘strategic’ plan. It’s called doing things.” — Herb Kelleher
