Tom Peters is the Bruce Springsteen, the Robert Redford, the Billy Graham of the management-consulting crowd. He has the whatever-it-takes to turn a fad into a phenomenon. He is, all by himself, a multimillion-dollar corporation. His first book, In Search of Excellence, coauthored with Robert Waterman (who has since become a forgotten man), sold 1.4 million hardcover copies and 2.3 million paperback copies in America alone. It has been translated into 15 languages. The hardcover version of the book was ranked number one by The New York Times for 40 of its 59 weeks on the list. The book was the first in publishing history to rank number one on hardcover and paperback lists at the same time. His second book, A Passion for excellence, coauthored with Nancy Austin (who was the forgotten woman before the ink was dry), sold half a million copies in the first six months. Given that, it is hard to form critical judgments, hard to step back, tune out the fanfare, and look once again at the book that started it all. Nevertheless, here goes.
As I reread the book, I allowed myself to slip back in time to the autumn of 1982, remembering my initial enthusiasm. I was given a copy of the galleys in my role as assistant editor of USC's fledgling New Management magazine. Since I was also finishing up an MBA at USC, having walked away, in a fit of midlife crisis, from a career as a television newscaster specializing in business and financial news, I felt that I was peculiarly well equipped to appreciate that book: as a newscaster, I had developed a sense of what was going right and what was going wrong with American business that was fairly congruent with what Peters and Waterman were saying. As a business school student, I knew they were right about what was wrong.
My personal disillusionment with Tom Peters began in March of 1983, just a few weeks before In Search of Excellence made number one on the best-seller lists. That Tom's article for the premiere issue of New Management (due out that April), called "We Understand: The Excellent Companies Revisited," was nothing more than a plug for his book hadn't bothered me at all. The people who had not yet read the book thought the article was great. So I was looking forward to meeting Tom when he came to speak to the USC business school students and faculty, where he was scheduled to take lunch in the president's dining room with all the administrative honchos in attendance.
I was asked to pick him up at the Queen Mary, where he was giving a speech for a group of executives from Bank of America, and derive him to USC. In my eagerness, I arrived at the Queen Mary about a half hour early. The man guarding the door graciously invited me in to watch the rest of Peters' show--and it was a show.
After Peters had squeezed into my MG, he asked at what point in the show I had walked in. I told him. He shook his head. "Damn bankers," he sighed. "I usually get a standing ovation at that point."
For me, the USC speech (without slides) was an anticlimax--although I asked him the question that was arguably either the most relevant or the least relevant of the day, depending on which professor was doing the arguing. I asked him how he could call a company that marketed junk food to undernourished ghetto children excellent, no matter what their other attributes. In other words, doesn't a company have to relate to its community? Doesn't it make a difference how a company makes it money? He said
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