106: Tom Peters - More Than Great, Let’s Be Excellent!

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxataalent.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out. Today we want our companies to be more than good. We want them to be more than great. We want them to be excellent. Today's Podcast Guest Today's show is all about achieving business excellence. Our guest, his name is synonymous with business excellence. We're talking with Tom Peters. Listen in. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and growth coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is an international management guru legend all that. I read the first book in 1982 when I was just starting college and it was powerful. You'll recognize it in a minute. He was a speaker at our Fortune Summit recently. He's written 16 great books. He's known all over the world. His name is synonymous with excellence. Welcome to the show, Tom Peters. Thank you.

It is a pleasure to be with you as it was to be in New Orleans for the program a couple months ago.

Yeah. So for our listeners we have speakers like Tom Peters who just so we met the night before at the speaker coach reception. Some of our clients get invited and like that. And I lingered because the mob around Tom was long people wanting. So I wait as I often do for the moment when there's an easy opening. And then I spent some time one on one with you after everybody had filtered off to the dinner. It was great. And then the next morning Tom came and opened our conference and just killed it with power and passion and a message that I think is really relevant. So I'm glad to have you on the show today. I'm just flown back from New York where I spent a long weekend. Came in at 4 in the morning. So I'm a little, definitely a little fuzzy headed today. And you so I'm back in the Bay Area just outside of San Francisco and Tom is, is outside of Boston about 70 miles south today, so we're connected by phone. And it's great that we can do this.

So also, it would be a delight if we were doing it in the Bay Area as a resident from 1970 to 2000. It's the Bay for better or for, I think, mostly for better. The Bay Area really defined me. And as you know as well as I, that was an utterly fascinating. Totally different from 2018, but an utterly fascinating time to be around Silicon Valley when it was just beginning its growth spurt and Steve Jobs was a little baby boy and so on.

Well, I was 17 in my first year of college when my dad said, oh, you should read this book, In Search of Excellence. Everybody was talking about it and, you know, it's been so long, I can't even remember all about.

No, but you want to know the funniest thing about what you said? Peter Drucker, whose work I deeply admire, thought that Bob Waterman and I with In Search of Excellence and our case studies were cheap popularizers. And so he offered the most cutting criticism that any human being could ever offer. And I read it in print. He said, well, fathers are just buying it to give to their teenage kids. And I said, holy shit, I can't think of a greater endorsement than that. But it was, you know, it was his ultimate put down. This isn't being read by real business people. Real business people are giving it to their kids. I mean, what more could a human being ask in life, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Really? Yeah. You know, I think about. That's really great. I think about that gift of that moment and the message that we as dads, and my dad to us and so on, you know, we think of and we want to give them the things that matter most to us, that touch us. That. And that is a beautiful compliment. He didn't realize.

Yeah, no, I. Absolutely. It's. It's an. It's an. I mean, the most important part of the compliment, frankly, is the notion that I won't say old guys. Bob and I, I was 40, he was 45 when the book came out. But the fact that either of us who, for heaven's sakes, were working at McKinsey, could have written a book that would translate into a readable tome for a late teenager. I mean, that's. That, you know, that was, you know, the funny, the funny thing, it's. There's another link to that that you bring to mind. Obviously, we had the great success that all great products have, which is called a pretty decent product with God gifted, brilliant, Timing, our timing just simply couldn't have been better. But at any rate, a lot of people bought the book and a lot of letters came in. And perhaps some came in from big company CEOs. Don't know, don't care. If you went to my storage locker today and found the couple of boxes of letters, I will tell you that every single one of them, who. The letters I got from In Search of Excellence would be from a police chief, a fire chief, a principal of an elementary school, for heaven's sakes. I got one from the number two guy in the Episcopal Diocese of New York. You know, I'm not being fair here, but you know what I would call real people with real jobs who had found inspiration in the book. And that was the turn on. I mean, God, you know, when you get a letter from a fire chief in a town of, say, 30,000 people who says, your book was really helpful, I mean, that's in that makes it all worthwhile category.

So how did, how did that, that book or the Obsession with Excellence begin for you? What's the well, did that story start?

Well, I will try to not take the next four hours of your time. God, how to do this? I was always good at arithmetic. That translated at age 18 into going to engineering school. And I looked at things in a quantitative fashion, no matter what it was. I got a civil engineering degree. My parents didn't have two cents to rub together, or maybe they had two, but they didn't have three. I went to Cornell. The tuition was high and the full tuition was picked up by, by the United States Navy. In the middle of my college career, which was 60 to 65, President Lyndon Baines Johnson created the Gulf of Tonkin incident from whole cloth, made the Iraq war thing look like small change. And the next thing you knew, we were in Vietnam. And the next thing you knew. Thing I knew with my civil engineering degree is I was part of what is called the United States Navy construction battalions, or CBs.

CBs.

CBs. And I was landing on an aircraft in an. In Da Nang, Vietnam, and suddenly I was responsible for the lives of 15 or 20 sailors. And with all my wonderful engineering degree, I was completely and totally unprepared. And that's a long winded way of saying that's when I realized there was more to life than math. And when, you know, this focus on people and leadership sort of was shoved down my throat. You know, the way the Seabees went to Vietnam is we went for nine months, we built stuff, we Came home for four and we went back for nine. When I got back from my first nine monther, I just, it was. I was stationed in Southern California, a place called Port Waianimi. But I went back home and when I went back home, I went up to Cornell and I walked into the Dean's office and I basically said, you son of a bitch. You sent me out of here with the most incredible engineering education known to humankind, but totally unprepared to work in and lead an organization. And back to your original question. The good news was that God smiled with a big grin and gave me an amazing commanding and I'm not sure I use the word excellence, but you know, he really taught me from day number one that your job is to in fact take care of the safety and the well being of your sailors and get the job done come both hell and high water. And then I got, then I got doubly lucky, as I said, two deployments. And I've written about my two commanding officers, I call them Captain Day and Captain Knight. And my second deployment commanding officer was one of the most awful leaders that I've ever run into. And the great news for me was, as I said to somebody, I've never had to think for 30 seconds since the end of that second deployment. All I have to do is think, what would Captain Day, Captain Dick Anderson, the first one, have done? And copy that. And what would Captain Knight, the second commanding officer done and run like hell from that one? Schwarzkopf said the same thing, incidentally, in his autobiography. He was a West Point graduate and he said the greatest thing in life that happened to me was my first commanding officer. And it was also Vietnam. My first commanding officer was awful. So he said all I had to do for the rest of my career was think, well, what would X have done? And then I did the opposite. And that's, you know, obviously simplistic, but it ain't that simplistic. And you know, so. And you know, how the word excellence per se got into my language is again, it's a story. I'm afraid that's too long. But the bottom line was I was doing a McKinsey report and my ex wife and I went to the San Francisco Ballet. It was an assignment that came at the last minute, the night before I read the report and I'm no ballet expert, but it was a gorgeous, spectacular performance. And I think this is an honest story. And you know, you can't trust your memory. A jillion years ago, this was probably 78 or 77 is I started thinking, why can you use words like excellence to describe ballet or theater or football or baseball or rugby? But when it comes to business, which, for heaven's sakes, is where most of us spend our life, whether it's a two person outfit or a two million person outfit, why do you never hear the darned word excellence? And it struck me as total nonsense. You know, I think, and I may be out of date here, but the number of active duty players on a National Football League team roster is 53. And what I've always said is if you put me in charge of a 53 person hotel housekeeping department, what I would say to those people when I walked in to meet them for the first time is that I see absolutely, and I'm not kidding about this, I see absolutely, positively no difference between you 53 people and the 53 people on the New England Patriots roster. We are a group of human beings attempting to accomplish a goal. In the case of the New England Patriots, they think, throw a funny little ball covered with dead pig skin up and down fake grass. And in our case, we serve customers with our hotel housekeeping department. But, you know, it is a human service activity. And excellence is as much an aspiration for my housekeeping department as it is for Mr. Belichick and his Patriots team or my wonderful old passed away friend Bill Walsh, who was the coach of the, as you well know, was the coach of the San Francisco 49ers for quite a while. So that's my long winded answer to your question.

It's a great answer. And I love going into the travel piece of it in the hotel. It's a great segue because we're supposed to be a service economy, right? And yet we get such crappy service. I stayed in a hotel in Honolulu about 10 times and, and not once. And I chose it because the location and number of things that I was pretty particular about and the budget and all that, and in those 10 times, they never once greeted me by name. They never once said, welcome back. We've upgraded your room, put you on a higher floor this time. We gave you a suite this time, 10 times, right. I went there. Now, they did give me a little bit of a corporate rate, but, but nothing really. I changed to another one down the street because we were moving a meeting where somebody knew somebody and I was greeted by name. There was amenity in my room and, you know, all of that like over the top kind of gracious stuff and beautiful upgraded room and all that. And it's Not, I would say, as much as just being acknowledged and greeted. I remember once I went to the Ritz Carlton and I had just stayed in this. It was like somewhere in Southern California. And that's a nice super premium brand and all that. But I checked in and I got my room and all that, and it was nice. And then I went out to dinner. I came back and they said, welcome back, Mr. Gallagher. And I'm like, wait, how did that happen? This is the first time I've ever been here. And then I went upstairs or something and then I came back the next day. They said, oh, would you like another glass of Zinfandel or something like that? Like, they'd remembered what I liked, they'd remembered me. They were taking the time to do that and they were hired for that. You talk in the book about Commerce bank and that story. You talk about Southwest. I came in on a flight that was delayed almost five hours last night and filled with mistakes in service. There was a mechanical issue that, that backed us up, but it lacked some of the graciousness that you taught. Why don't you talk a little bit about just the humanity.

I think that you did it in spades. And there are two things I would say. First of all, I would reinforce your Ritz Carlton story. This was not in my current book. I don't remember whether I ever put it in the book. But I remember talking about the Ritz Carlton to somebody and they told me the most wonderful story. They were in a room with their young daughter who was in a cot in the room or whatever it was, and there was a teddy bear, which used to be, it may or may not still be, was one of the things that the Ritz Carlton did, if a kid was staying in a room, there would be a teddy bear in the room. Each time they came back to the room, the maid would have hidden the teddy bear with a cookie in its arms. And I remember the guy telling me this and he said, good God, he said, if I live to be 99 or even 109, I will remember that. You know, the little game that the housekeeper played with my 4 year old daughter with the cookie and the teddy bear. And it really is true that, you know, those are the memories that last a lifetime. And, you know, the important thing, you know, relative to the thing that kind of brings us to this conversation, which is this new book that I wrote called the Excellence Dividend is I'm arguing, and others could argue the other way, that it is that kind of human touch that will Be more of a differentiator rather than less of a differentiator as we automate every damn thing known to humankind. I contend that with my 53 person New England Patriots of Housekeeping that I can do what you're talking about, which is to differentiate my hotel in a way that will be memorable. And it damn well will be memorable in 2018. And I think it will be memorable in 2028. You know, maybe AI will take all our jobs by 2038, but you and I have got to get through the next five weeks, five years and so on. First, and I think it's, you know, my argument in a nutshell in this darn book is those kinds of things in a hardware company, the Steve Jobs like attention to design in a service company, the sorts of things that you and I are talking about at a Southwest or at a Ritz Carlton are the differentiators and they are doable. The difficulty with it is you've got to have a culture where the people who work for you are encouraged to do that. I'll tell you one more story going back those Old Navy days when I didn't have 2 cents to rub together because my salary was less than 2 cents. I bought auto insurance through a specialist company called usaa. Some people who are listening to us know it. The original letters were United Services Automobile association. And poor soldiers and sailors without 2 cents to rub together could in fact get insurance. But here's my point. They don't have physical offices. Everything is done by phone. I still have USAA. I'm now a 52 year member or something like that. But their call center is a gift from the gods, first of all, and I'm not being politically incorrect, or if I am, I apologize for being so. The company is headquartered in San Antonio and I'm not a Texan. It has nothing really to do with that. But it's very nice to have the phone answered on no more than the third or fourth ring and hear a Texas accent. Then we have a conversation. And the last time I was on with a guy and it was during football season and I had some, you know, little issue that had come up with my policy. So we start talking about football. And you know, it must have been at the five minute mark, I said to the guy, finally I said, oh my God. I said, I like to talk. And I said, I have this sneaking suspicion that there's somebody standing behind you with a gun pointed at your temple. And I am, excuse my language, pissing away your day with football talk. And he started laughing. He said, you may have been a member for 50 years, but you still don't get it. He said, we are told to talk until the sun goes down if the client wants to. Because he said, I'm in the client development business. He said, I'm doing my best to solve your problem. Which he did skillfully. But he was there Even with a 52 year member with me to solidify that relationship. And you couldn't pay me to in fact change companies. And you know, when somebody says a call center, you know, I just, I just, I love those guys. I love to, you know, I remember actually talking about it in that same cocktail party before the New Orleans event that you mentioned. I remember talking to somebody about it and they knew about it. USAA and I said, in a million years, you will never convince me in 2018, using every bit of software which you should do, which is available. You won't convince me that you can't have a call center that is your number one customer service, customer experience asset if your head's in the right place, if you hire the right way and so on.

But I think that goes to one of the fundamental lies of modern business, certainly in the United States and maybe in many places around the world. And it happens when you call the company and the first thing that you hear is your call is important to us. Bullshit. Sorry. If your call was important to me, a human being would have answered the phone. And we were thinking about this recently and I had to switch phone companies. We're reorganizing our office and the technology and stuff like that. And I was about to switch to a different system and I thought, you know what? I know. And it crossed my radar at that moment. We should ditch that and go to a thing that's been answered. So we switched to a service called Ruby and I actually put a link to them in the thing. If other people are having the epiphany that their phone should be answered by a human being who's thinking and breathing and feeling. But I'm like, I don't get that many calls in the office. Most people call us directly, my assistant, our coordinator, our producer, or my mobile phone. We all get direct calls because people know to call our mobile now. But. But the few calls that come in to the main number because they can't find it because they haven't worked with us yet, that's the time when I should spend the most on.

Right, absolutely.

Take care of the. Listen to them.

You know, the small variation on that theme I remember When I had my training company back in Palo Alto years ago, and, you know, we had a bit of a reputation, so clients were, you know, very likely to come to see us when the year end came in terms of bonuses. And I did this in a very public fashion. I gave the single bit, you know, I had. I had salespeople who were bringing in a couple million bucks in business. I gave the biggest bonus in our company to the woman who was our receptionist. And I did it for the right reasons, honest to God. And you know this as well as I do, or better than I do, and she made more sales than our most effective salesperson. When you walked into that office, you felt welcome. You know, she had done what your Ritz Carlton people did. She knew your name, she knew where you were coming in from, you know, relative to your experience last night. You know, she would say, you know, oh my God, you must be exhausted. I know your flight didn't get in until 4:00 in the morning. And, you know, which is the sort of thing you can figure out and especially in today's world. And she, you know, to say that she was worth her weight in gold is to grossly understate what she was worth.

Well, you know, it's. So tell us about, remind us. Our folks have heard a lot of things about Southwest, but share the story that you tell in the book about the captain in Southwest.

Yeah, it's my standout example of differentiation. I was flying from Albany, New York a couple of years ago. My wife and I at the time lived in Vermont, and Albany was my home airport, as it were, flying from Albany, New York, down to Washington D.C. specifically to BWI. It was a morning flight. The pilots came in from a connector and they must have been eight or ten gates away. Their flight had gotten in a little bit late because of weather problems. On time is everything. And so the pilot and the co pilot were rushing down the hallway. I'm standing near the gate, as is invariably the case. There were three or four or five wheelchairs at the gate. This pilot who is rushing, is rushing toward the gate. He gets near the gate, he turns, walks up to the woman in the first wheelchair with a genuine smile and says, would you mind if I took you and your wheelchair down the Jetway? I think that it is accurate to say that I've had between 8 and 10,000 flight legs and that was the first time I had ever seen anything like that in my life. And you know the funny thing, which is not funny at all, and it's consistent with what you were saying a second ago is I told that story fairly recently and somebody in the audience put up his hand. He said, I've never even seen a pilot look at a customer when they went down the jet way, you know, let alone find somebody in a wheelchair and take them down. And, you know, there are a couple things I would say. I would repeat what I said earlier. A, it's the sort of thing that you remember literally, not figuratively, for the rest of your life, but B, which is critical. It comes as a product of the culture and hiring practices. Colleen Barrett was the former president of Southwest, and I actually quote her in the book. And Ms. Barrett said, we look for listening, caring, smiling, saying thank you and being warm. And she said we look for it as much in the pilots and the mechanics as we do with the flight attendants or the gate personnel. And so if you want nice, hire for nice. You know, I've got another example in the book of a pharmaceutical company which seems unlikely, is the dickens. It's a startup with a couple of hundred employees. Employees. And their founder says, we only hire nice people. And he said it's as true of microbiologists as it is of anybody else. He said, there are actually a lot of very good microbiologists out there. Don't hire the jerks. Which brings me to another point, which I hope that I emphasize throughout the book or throughout the last 30 years is. And I always tease, I'm not really sure it's teasing HR people. And I say, learn how to speak English. Learn how to have a hiring manual that says we hire nice people. It's not that we look for people who are able to deal effectively in conversations. We want nice people. Use the word four letters. Nice.

Yeah, it's a focus or preoccupation on that. Right. Like, I don't know if you mentioned this, but I seem to recall reading Commerce bank had in their hiring practice, they looked for a resting or a natural smile face. And I'm like, oh, I could never get hired then because I'm a little serious looking. My sort of resting face is a little serious. Right. Intentional, focused. Man, I'm a nice guy, but. But it takes something to crack the smile. And I think that was their thing, among their things was to tell right away were you naturally smiling. And I remember once I hired a woman who was in the front row of one of my workshops in a room of over 100 people. And she just. Every time I look down there, she's beaming up at me like, what I was saying. Was golden. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to go back to her regularly, not because everybody else doesn't love me, but because like, that's a place I can sort of get nurtured and taken care of and then go be generous again somewhere else. So I just sort of, I'd come back to her and I'd come back to her and she'll know who she is when she's listening. But like, it was really, really helpful and it was like, oh, I should have her on my team.

Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. I mean, among, among many other things, that's exactly the way that I give a speech. You know, I, when I'm, when I'm making a point, and particularly maybe if it's a pointed point, as it were. You know, I look for body language. I look at somebody who's smiling, I look for somebody who seems to be enjoying themselves. And you know, I will, I will, you know, I, I will essentially have a one on one conversation with them. And because then both she and I are smiling, we end up making the other 200 people smile as. And there's, there's, you know, it's funny because there's actually research evidence that says if you're looking at one person intent, intently, everybody thinks they're looking at you and you are looking directly at them. If you're looking generally out at the audience, you are making no human contact with anybody.

Yeah. That's a really power. We didn't need to get into speaking tips, but I, That's a story. Super powerful speaking tip to just connect and speak to one person for a minute and then if you just include the whole room in your awareness, but be connected to the one person, it's very powerful.

Yeah. And sometimes when I've been giving speeches in big crowds, like a couple of thousand people, and they've really got the AV right. And the AV meaning sometimes because I move around a lot. An organizer will hire a sports cat.

Yeah.

You know, meaning somebody with a camera on their shoulders who will follow you around.

Right.

And I will literally go into the audience, ask somebody to move and sit down in an audience of 2,000 people next to you.

Yeah.

And with the camera in our face, you and I will have, you know, a person, a personal conversation for the next 30 seconds or 90 seconds or 2 minutes or what have you. And people eat it up because there on the screen is the two of us conversing with each other. But it's hugely. I've got to tell you one small story that may make you laugh. I was speaking to, I think it was senior Aetna people years ago. And I focus a lot on more women in managerial positions and senior positions and so on. And so I walked into this group and, you know, it was an issue that the CEO had brought up with me and said, if you can reinvent forces, it'll be great. So I'm talking to these senior agents who are worth a jillion bucks, and there's a guy in the front row who just got a terrific smile of the sort that you described. And so I looked at him, and it's a sensitive subject, or somewhat sensitive. And so I looked at him and I said, well, my wife is here with me, which was a total lie. And I said, she looked at that book that you guys had with the pictures of all the people who are here. And I said, she went through the book and she said to me, tom, this is not a very diverse group. And I said, susan, that is not true. We've got old white guys and young white guys. We've got fat white guys and thin white guys, white guys with lots of hair, white guys who are bald. The whole place was roaring. And it was, you know, it was a fairly sensitive point. You know, it was not diversity per se, but it was, we need more women. We need a group of people who look more like the customer base. But it was a hoot and everybody was laughing about it. And 100 people came up to me afterwards. But, you know, you try to turn the speech into a conversation among friends. If you don't convince anybody, you know, there's an old one liner which happens to be true. I believe you don't change anybody's mind unless you can make them laugh at you and laugh at themselves.

Our fifth value, laughter. Laughing especially at yourself. We like to keep the work fun.

Well, it's funny. With Laugh at Yourself, there was, I remember reading a biography of President General Eisenhower. And of course, before the D Day thing, the Brits were led by Montgomery. We had Eisenhower who was in charge of the whole event. And somebody was talking about the difference between the two. And they said, eisenhower and Montgomery both love to tell jokes. All of Eisenhower's jokes were at his own expense. All of Montgomery's jokes were at other people's expense. And, you know, it was so telling. And the book, incidentally, had this. Had this, you know, and it really is just the most extraordinary leadership commentary that I may ever have read. And Eisenhower, maybe it was, you know, coming from Kansas, but Eisenhower had this incredible demeanor and when D day came, Montgomery gave a speech and Eisenhower went down to the beach and talk to boys one at a time. And the line that the author had gotten from somebody is that Eisenhower was so empath. God, I can't. You know, I cannot tell you this line over the phone without getting quite emotional that Eisenhower's attachment to his soldiers was such that parents were willing to send their boys to die for him. I mean, if ever there has been a powerful sentence or a powerful statement or a powerful commentary on leadership, that's got to be it.

I think if you honor and respect people. Right. To segue back into what I get was the message of the book for leaders. And we deal with leaders, the CEO and the owners, the founder, the leadership team. If you want to create a culture that takes care of people, that gives good service, then you've got to start with yourself. You've got to care for your team yourself. Begin by hiring and putting your attention on your people. That's what I read again and again through here and heard in your remarks is actually care for your own team, for your own people. And they will in turn care for your customers and turn those customers into fans.

Absolutely. I think it's the thing, and it's actually not exactly in the book, but I was just so worked up about talking to your gang is. I said, what is an enterprise? It is people serving people, period. What is a leader's job? People serving leader, people serving people who serve people. You know, I hope that everybody who is listening to us will go out and buy my book and buy 10 copies of my book. But also when you do it, go back into ye olde days and find that Robert Greenleaf book called Servant Leadership. You know, the whole idea of a leader of anything, whether it's General Eisenhower and hundreds of thousands of young men heading for the beaches of Normandy, or whether it is our 12 person training department, or whether it is our 27 or whatever person automobile dealership. We're in the business and serving people, helping people. And one of the things that. But going back to the technology change and so on, that I really try to say in the book. And I'm not a very religious person and I don't go to church every Sunday. But there is a moral responsibility, given all the change that surrounds us, there's a moral responsibility on the part of every leader to have the person who works for him or her leave the company in better shape than when they arrived. I mean, maybe they will stay for 25 years, which is terrific, but it's not likely these days. Even if you worked for me for only seven months on a project, I want you to be able to walk off of that project being better prepared for tomorrow than you were when you got here.

Yeah, that's. Yeah. I think we talk about having a business purpose at the beginning and the core of our strategy and deeply ingrained in the company. And then we go into personal planning. We try to connect personal values and a personal purpose with that. And people find themselves in their foot fulfillment in the work. And even if they're only with you for a year or two, they realize they've contributed to something that mattered to them.

Absolutely. And you know what? You can think of as a great analogy when you use the point, even if they're only around for a year, think of the great second grade teacher, a significant share of whose kids remember her or him 25 years later, he only has, or she only has 10 months, the length of a school year. My mom, when I went to high school, I went to a private school. My parents didn't have the money for it. So my mother, who had been a stay at home mom, I mean, this was, you know, the early 50s, for heaven's sakes, started teaching the fifth grade. And she was a natural. And when my mother died at age 96 in 2005, at the memorial service, the thing that ripped me to shreds was the number of 55 year olds who came up to me who had been in my mother's fifth grade classroom and said, that year with your mother was probably more important to the rest of my life than any other single experience I've had. And, you know, it is that ability. You know, I got into something on Twitter a while back when somebody was going on and on about Elon Musk is changing the world and so on and is the most amazing human being we have. And I was being a bit of a smart aleck, but for the best of reasons, I think, or hope. And I said, yeah, I have enormous respect for Elon Musk. Almost as much respect as I have for that second grade teacher who year in and year out dramatically changes 25 lives or 19 lives or whatever it happens to be.

Yeah, we think of, we all know, teachers that touched us, that stood out for us, bosses that were extraordinary. There's a letter that used to be given out to people at Apple. There's work and there's your life's work, the kind of work that has your fingerprints all over it. Right. They want their work to add up to something People come here to swim in the deep end. You know, that's that kind of like, welcome to that. Be. Be extraordinary. Be great. That teacher that, that sees something in you, that boss that, that calls you to be extraordinary, even if you're only there with them for a minute, is like that shock quote, right? A splendid torch. We give our life to something that moves us deeply, that matters, that we're proud of, that we think on. And that's the kind of thing that people, they leave their BS jobs and then they go volunteer somewhere and they do something that they care about, and then they show up and they put in the work for a minute, prostituting themselves in a sense to give you to trade their time and their life and energy and their soul for their rent. And then they go give their passion somewhere else. But if you could touch their passion, they would work 10 times harder. They would do an extraordinary job for you. And when you connect that. And I think companies don't realize that virtually everyone. I had a CEO tell me once, all this stuff never really works for us. And I'm afraid to go here and deal with this because it just doesn't seem to resonate. And we spent maybe 40 minutes with his team exploring what their purpose was. And we asked the question, what difference does it make? Why does it matter? And we sent people off on a walking exercise to just ask it back and forth in pairs and to probe until they got to something that resonated. Then we, we rolled up their answers and we looked at it together. What emerged was we keep the world working. And they just like it went thunk in the room. You could feel it like, that's it. We care about that. That's a contribution that's of service. And suddenly this staffing firm had a purpose.

Yeah, no, I think that's. Well, I think it's an absolutely wonderful story. And. Well, you know, the, the line I've always used, and particularly with entrepreneurs is I've said my ex wife's father was in the tombstone business in western Missouri. So I'm an expert on tombstones. In all of my life, I have never seen a tombstone that had somebody's net worth on it. You know what the tombstone says? Peggy Noonan had this thing when the journalist Tim Russert passed away. And he was a tough interviewer. He was not a. No softie at all, but he was just known as an extraordinary human being. And she wrote this thing in the Wall Street Journal. And I won't get it right, but it's very consistent with what she said, she said, the world says it worships fame, but actually it doesn't. The world says it worships money, but actually it doesn't. In the end, what we say is, Joe, how did Joe take care of people? And you know, that's, that's the case. And what I feel in that regard, whether it's one of our business owners or whether it's, you know, supervisor in an insurance company is leadership is an awesome opportunity and responsibility. You know, a leader in the course of her or his life. And I'm not talking about somebody who's CEO of a 17,000 person company, a leader in the course of his or her life has the opportunity to literally change the life trajectory of thousands of people. I purposefully got in trouble giving a speech a while back and there were a whole bunch of doctors in the room. And I said, the average manager can transform more lives than a surgeon can with the knife. It's an amazing opportunity. You get to help your fellow man. As I said, I'm not giving this from the pulpit. I may have been raised a Presbyterian, but I haven't darkened a whole lot of Presbyterian church doors in later years. But it is, it's religion with a lot lowercase are. It's about spirit, it's about helping people. The sorts of things that you were talking about that, you know, that, that came out of that exercise that you.

Did so that in, in your thing. The thing that I noticed is that in caring for people, there's a whole, there's a range of people that we're missing out on. And there's a quality of, of diversity of thinking and opinion that we're missing out on. And the biggest one that we're not paying enough attention to, that we're undervaluing was women.

Yeah, I mean, that's been a campaign of mine since 1996. I would say two things briefly. One thing is the research literature is increasingly showing that women are, frankly speaking, as a boy who's happy to be a boy, women are more effective at leadership than men are because they are more sensitive to the, you know, to the people who work for them. But let me flip it around a little bit, because when I started talking about the women's issue from day number one, I made it very clear. I said, I am not talking about social justice. I'm talking about something else. And the statistics are absolutely, positively, unequivocally clear. Women are the people who make the purchasing decisions for damn near everything. They make them for consumer products, of course. But in 2018, at least in the United States, over 50% of professional purchasing officers are women. They are the ones who make the decisions about whether I will buy from you or whether I will not buy from you. And what I talk about in the book is what I call my squint test. I want to see a photograph of the 12 people who constitute the executive team of our company. And I'm not talking about quotas. I'm not talking about the law. I want to squint at that picture, and I want the picture to look approximately like the marketplace. If 70% of the purchasing decisions are being made by women, I don't want to see an executive team of 12 people that has two women on it. And so there is a very, very, very pragmatic reason for this. You know, it's utterly. If you want a number that will knock your socks off in the next five years, between earlier male deaths and women's increasing success in the marketplace, women in the United states will control 22 trillion more of assets than they control right now. I mean, holy smoke. And so there's an incredibly pragmatic reason to have women in significant leadership positions. And then on top of that, you've got this research that shows women are better negotiators, women are better investors, women are better leaders. So for a whole bunch of reasons, I am not suggesting that all the males should be tossed out the seventh floor window, but what I am suggesting is if you ain't got gender balance on the board and on the executive team, you are making a grave mistake in terms of leadership talent, and also in terms of the market that you're trying to serve.

Yeah, I heard that loud and clear. And I hear it again now. The thing that immediately comes to mind to me is, well, how do you do that? And it feels to me like if you want to begin to bring. It's not about a quota or a particular thing, although it doesn't hurt to begin to try to have it reflect that, to set some targets. But I think if we just begin to appreciate the difference. So if I begin to appreciate feminine, all things feminine, and not just look for a woman who can fit into a boys club, but I begin to appreciate and honor all things that you might, instead of quashing that, that gives me some access to creating an environment that welcomes and encourages that voice.

No, I think that's absolutely right. It sure as hell is not. You know, let's find somebody who can fit with the guys that's.

Well, there's a lot of that around.

Enormous problems in Silicon Valley right now. You know, there was an interesting. There was. I think the book was called Tough Name Brotopia, and about some of the problems in the valley. But one of the comments, which is just what you said that this author made, and some of the problems that people like that companies like Facebook are having in the marketplace is she said, if you had more women. And there's a critical word in this sentence, if you had more women writing code for the Facebooks of the world, there would be a more of a feminine sensibility that got introduced to the code itself. And, you know, I didn't know what that sentence meant when I read it the first time, but I talked to a bunch of people about it and I reflected on it myself, and it's, you know, it's absolutely true. Life is not a computer game. And, you know, women do tend. I remember reading the research years ago. There was this terrific book written by a neuropsychologist whose name is Lou Anne Brizendine. And the name of the book was the Female Brain. And one little teeny experiment that was reported on is that by the age of three days, baby girls are making four times more eye contact with their fellow human beings than you and I did at the age of three days. That is, this human connection thing is hardwired into women's brains more than it is into yours and into mine. Yeah, there are exceptions to every rule. There are tenured women, and there are men who really do empathize. So I'm not being an idiot about this, but in general. And these are the attributes, again, in my opinion, which is the centerpiece of the damn book. These are the attributes which will humanize services and create service and product experiences that really are the way that we will make it out into the light, the lighted end of the tunnel as technology moves in big time.

Well. Well, for sure, each of us has qualities and moments of both masculine and feminine in us. Men and women each have that. And the more we can integrate and honor all sides of human beings and ourselves and all that, there's access to something more. I know I certainly got better as a coach, as a speaker, as a human being when I learned to laugh, to cry, to connect, to feel, to move, to dance a little. There's a variety of things. Right. And you might call all those things feminine in nature, but have greatly expanded my effectiveness, for sure. But also my joy in life.

Yeah. Yes. I mean, that's that. You know, let's. You may want to cut part of this program We've talked a long time.

Don't cut that.

Don't cut that sentence. I am ordering you as your non editor to keep that sentence intact. Because you know, one of my favorite books written by a guy by the name of Rich Sheridan who runs a software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is called Joy. And he argues there is utterly no reason why it should not be a very joyful experience. And you talked about this a few minutes ago to go to work. And it's a criminal act at some level if it's not. Because unless you were born with a big silver spoon in your mouth, you are going to spend the majority. No matter how much you love and adore your family, you're going to spend the majority of your adult waking hours at work. And per your point about the person who is turned off at work and then is a fantastic Girl Scout or Boy Scout leader, if we can get that energy into the workplace, it will bring human joy to our workplace, which ain't no small thing. And I strongly believe it will then be translated into the world of our vendors and our customers and so on. And it's tragic not to make that happen.

Well, it's really great. We've talked definitely a little long for the show, but I think our folks are listening because was a great conversation. The book will make your you a better leader and your company a better business. It's the excellence dividend. Of course. Tom's done 16 books, but this is the latest and greatest. It was an extraordinary conversation. Your first book, I said my dad gave to me, shared with me when I was 17. He also shared with me Shaw's quote, a splendid torch. Right. And I think we've been speaking to that. This is the true joy in that.

Absolutely.

Being used for a purpose, recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Right. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community. As long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. And I so hear that in everything that you said both at the summit and here today.

Well, that's a very kind interpretation. I hope it's correct. It's the reason I'm still on the phone at the age of 75. Because it's a message that I really, really care about and I think it'll make your world my world and the world at large a little bit better when we go to bed than it was when we woke up. So I appreciate greatly the time.

Well, I hope I can work through 75 into my 80s. Yep. Thank you so much. So Tom Peters tompeters.com excellence dividend.com, go find the book on Amazon, go to Tom's website of course we're here every week with another podcast guest or something. In the world of scaling up, developing your business and yourself as a leader, find us@scalingupbusiness.com thanks again so much Tom for being with us and have a great week.

Oh thanks. Thanks for a wonderful conversation. Our conversation made my week, so it's a deal.

Special thanks to our original growth guru, Vern Harnish. Our show is produced by Nye Obaid. Audio production is by Podfly Productions and audio editing is by Albert Burge. Our show notes are compiled by Ein Codena with proofreading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of today's show, please share it with somebody else and let us know the parts that you love. Thanks again for listening and Keep Scaling up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align. It's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by alignment. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.