The Peters Principles

The management gury as playground director, provacateur, and passionate defender of open societies.

Virginia Postrel from the October 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 7)

Gurudom not only includes total assholes like Tony Robbins and myself, who I hope is only half an asshole, but also the gurus like the Henry Mintzbergs and the Gary Hamels, who are actually quite legitimate but have become gurus in their own right--Mike Porter and so on. The other part of that is the CEO as guru--Lee Iacocca started that. Twenty years ago the average educated American could not have named two chief executive officers in America, with the exception of the one who ran their company.

But I think the Iacocca thing, the Peters and Waterman thing, the Robbins thing, the [Ken] Blanchard thing, and the Hamel-Porter thing is a very specific reaction of a whole lot of people who are confused by all the shit that's going down. When people are confused, they want people on white horses to lead them. Obviously it didn't have to be me and Bob, and Blanchard and [John] Naisbitt and Porter and so on, any more than it had to be Iacocca and Ted Turner. But it had to be.

We are also talking about a boringly garden-variety uniquely American tradition that starts with Ben Franklin. We are the improvers. I heard it best stated on a morning show on television somewhere: The difference between the Americans and the Europeans is all Americans believe that problems have solutions. All Europeans believe that solutions have problems. And it struck me as a brilliant encapsulation. Emerson, Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, and Tony Robbins are boringly part of the same stream.

And, you know, Franklin was a phony. All his simplistic prescriptions. Tony Robbins, I knew Ben Franklin, and Tony Robbins, you're no Ben Franklin. And that is true. He's certainly no Emerson either. But, stretching a lot, if Tony Robbins is the Ben Franklin of 1997, then Scott Adams [the creator of Dilbert] is the Mark Twain or Will Rogers of 1997, who was doing the same reverse-spin cynical stuff.

Reason: You said that your adult professional life has been an attempt to exorcise the demon of Robert McNamara. What would America or American business look like, pre- and post-exorcism?

Peters: Neither of us is naive. And I have said this when I am being honest: What McNamara did during World War II, like find out where our planes were, and what he did at Ford, which was find out how many cars we've made, were not silly. We had created these enormous organizations. If you're a good conservative, you can call them hopeless socialist microeconomies in and of themselves--which they were. We didn't know what the hell was going on, and so Tex Thornton and McNamara and Arjay Miller and all that gang of Whiz Kids did fabulously good stuff.

But then that McNamarian logic became essentially the de facto wisdom of the Harvard Business School, which set the pace for large American enterprise. And it set the pace for American enterprise in a very Republican--much more than a Democrat--way from 1950 until Ronald Reagan. It was a ridiculous situation, which was big company Republicanism vs. big labor Democraticism and neither of them worth a shit.

Reason: You wrote a Forbes ASAP column about Friedrich Hayek. What do you like about Hayek?

Peters: The spontaneous discovery idea. As I said in Liberation Management: The mess is the message. To me that's the joy of Santa Clara County, San Mateo County, and all economies that work, Hong Kong for the next--whatever it is now--15, 45 days.

I am not one of those people who tends to read books multiple times. But [Hayek's 1988 book] The Fatal Conceit I find I can read over. I've probably read it, literally cover to cover, word for word, a half dozen times. Every 18 months or so I go back and read it again just to make sure my religion has not slipped in any way, shape, or form.

Reason: How would you describe that "religion"?

Peters: The only way I can describe it is go way back 18,000 years ago to In Search of Excellence. That book was organized around eight principles. And number one on the list was something that Bob Waterman and I called "a bias for action." The whole notion of experimentation has always been at the top of my agenda. The economy--as you do see so absolutely vividly in a Silicon Valley or in the street markets of Delhi or Shanghai--is an unplanned experiment. The objective is to get as much shit going as you possibly can. And then, occasionally, out of that pops the 3Coms or the Netscapes of the world, or the Gaps, or the Banana Republics.

Reason: Not one experiment really. It's the....

Peters: It's the density. It is the critical mass. In Silicon Valley, it's the combination of everything from the hippies of Haight Ashbury to the craziness of San Francisco, to the Berkeleys and the Stanfords interacting with the UCSFs and the San Jose States, plus the venture capital folks at 3000 Sandhill Road, and the good weather, and a lot of good bars, and health clubs. And that's the part that's almost impossible to copy. I mean, there's no secret that is safe from a bar in Sunnyvale. And that's a great deal of the secret to success. Despite the fact that we can all assume multiple identities and cross-dress in various chat rooms on the Web, I have some difficulty imagining pure insanity arising on the Web the way I think it does here.

Reason: Pure insanity is a good thing?