As a long time Tom Peters fan, I was ecstatic when I heard “Gil the Jenius” had found words of hope from something new from Tom Peters. So on Gil’s suggestion I rushed over to Change This and read the new material. The Tomato Manifesto was a good reminder of why I think Tom Peters is so great. However, having read his book Re-imagine, this manifesto doesn’t cover much new ground.
Still it is great to read Tom’s stuff. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel drunk with a promise. A promise that other people see the systems we work within and perpetuate as they are, are just plain wrong. Inside, where it counts, I find myself screaming “Hell yes!” and “That’s what I’m talking about”! As my super-ego driven, politically correct, worker/diplomat inhibitions recede, I get more woozy greedily drinking in Tom’s positive vibes. As long as I keep reading, all is right with the world – I have hope, I see new opportunity, I believe that the impossible seems suddenly possible.
Now if you’ve ever celebrated too much, you know that eventually the good times come to an end. You may feel pretty good just before you go to sleep, but when you wake up your perspective changes 180 degrees. Your new outlook after waking can be pretty painful, or at least so I’m told. The reason I bring in this analogy is because it is the way I feel after reading Tom Peters. While I’m reading I feel pumped, but when I have to go back to work or read the newspaper or watch the news, I’m flooded with this feeling of disappointment. I feel as if I’ve been fooled. Perhaps this is a harsh reaction, but the contrasts that the manifesto illustrates is exactly what I’m talking about. While reading Tom’s rants there is feeling that someone understands that there is a better way, but when I try to reconcile or connect Tom’s positions to reality, I become immediately aware of the chasm between the two opposites.
I’m often shocked that most companies remain viable and, dare I say, profitable. Most business are full of unproductive, uncooperative, and damaging people, policies, and processes. The only way these companies remain alive is through the personal sacrifice, passion and diligence of a few “freaks” (as Tom refers to them). In software development there is a model that attempts to grade a software development process. Within this model there are five different levels (grades). The first level is called chaos and the freaks I mentioned are called champions. Almost all software development processes are at level one.
If we assume that conducting business is essentially no different than creating software development. They are both collections of people attempting to complete a task (or collection of tasks) to attain a specific result. What I would suggest is that if there were a comparable grading system for companies, most companies would be graded as being at level one, chaos. If you agree, then the big question becomes: “How do we get our companies to receive a better grade?”
Staying with our drinking metaphor, companies are like alcoholics. Often most companies live in denial. Typically there are people close to the company, front-line employees for example, that attempt to tell the leadership of the company that they have a problem. But what does the company usually do when people tell them about the problem? They deny that there is a problem. So counselors then advise family that the only thing left to do when an alcoholic lives in denial is to wait until they hit bottom and be ready to catch them. Only with companies, when they hit bottom they fire (I mean lay off) everyone that would be able to catch the company.
It all sounds pretty hopeless then, right? Well one more analogy and I’ll bring this to a close. Gil is right, there is only one thing we can do. This is like religion: we need to have faith and believe. Within our churches, mosques, synagogues, and cathedrals we hear and learn that there are higher ideals, let’s use loving your neighbor as yourself as an example. In a world full of terror, greed, and fools it can be extremely challenging to love your neighbor. The approach I take is to keep it simple. Do what you can, attempt to live the ideal as much as humanly possible, don’t sweat the rest, and hope that others take notice and see that it is possible to live the ideal (at least some of the time).
Tom Peters actually has his own similar approach. It is called “Brand You”. We may not be able to convince our friends, our peers, or our bosses that this Tom Peter’s guy is onto something, but as individuals we can choose to do what we can do to live up to the ideals. We can change the way we approach our work. We can embrace the Internet, we can embrace globalization, we can hire quirky, creative, and multi-cultural, we can hire people smarter than ourselves and then hang on for the ride, we can pursue great design, and we can accept that safe is risky (That one is from Seth Godin). We can only do, what we can do. When we are in a position to embrace change and influence others, then we should. We need to look for ways to try new things. Just because something has always worked for us, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a better way!
