The Peters Principles

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

Virginia Postrel from the October 1997 issue

(Page 7 of 7)

Reason: Another thing Brooks says is, "Businessmen used to like to describe themselves as warriors but now artists are the role models of choice." What do you make of the critique?

Peters: It's total bullshit! I mean, would you call Scott McNealy an artist? Not by a long shot. Larry Ellison may well sit on Zen Buddhist rocks, but he is a warrior out of the Rockefeller mold, to put it mildly.

Reason: I thought of Larry Ellison when I read that, because the Japanese model is the samurai, who is an artist and a warrior.

Peters: There is no reason not to encompass both. Steve Jobs is perhaps the most competitive human being I have ever met in my life, and yet I would argue one of the most artistic human beings I have ever met in my life. You can trash the movies all you want, but they do have an artistic component. And yet brutal competition knows no peers when it comes to Hollywood.

The 10 or 12 artists I have known really well all my life are at least as competitive as professional athletes. They may express it in slightly different terms, but you look at the Jackson Pollocks et al., and they are as interested in wall space in the galleries as Joe Montana is in the percentage of completed passes. So the notion that symphonic conducting, or stage play, or pure art, is not a competitive business is real bullshit.

Reason: I also sent you a Los Angeles Times column by Gary Chapman, who founded Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. He's very upset that people are saying that "policy making"--by which he means centrally deciding--is an anachronism and "the only appropriate response is to surrender our desire for control." How do you respond?

Peters: I think you would have to be a total idiot not to realize that Alan Greenspan and the head of the Bundesbank are not as powerful as their predecessors were 50 years ago. But the major Hayekian, Braudelian point was that government really never could do shit and what was fundamental were the transactions in the private sector. That was their point--long before the Internet became a part of our life. So to a large extent things have never been in control.

The Hayekian argument that I love is that more government documents simply continued to exist over time than records of private-sector transactions. So if we pay attention to what we can research in the Harvard library, that's the collections of government documents as opposed to the day-by-day transactions of the General Electrics of the world. There's a lot of truth to that. Economic history has not been the essence of the study of history.

Reason: Many conservatives hate economic and social history. They think it's terrible to study everyday life. They think it's a plot by evil Marxist professors. It's not that I don't think people should study political or intellectual history, but if you want to know what the past was like, recovering the textures of life is critically important.

Peters: That's the key. The best summer I ever spent was about five years ago, when I wanted to sort out in my mind: What the hell went on when the Industrial Revolution came? I went back to as close as I could find to the original sources and read about the real history of how the Springfield Armory came about, and how the Harper's Ferry Armory came about. And it was fabulous stuff!

Reason: How do you see the future of business?

Peters: There's this terrible or wonderful paradox/dichotomy: What it means to be human is not going to dramatically change in the next 50 years probably, but the way we conduct a lot of enterprise will, so the world will be radically different, radically different. There are two halves of the brain. There's the logical half and the primitive half. The primitive half hasn't evolved in the last several million years, and the logical half is moving at a jillion miles an hour. I think that will continue to be the warfare.

It is going to be a big wrestling match. It's going to be great fun. That's why my fundamental nature is Popperian and Hayekian. The one thing that I'm sure of is those who are playful will win, or at least they will lose with vigor, which to me means much more than winning in a narrow sense of the word.

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.16.10 @ 1:24AM|#

bvjfty

log in or register to reply