About one month ago, there was a bit of debate around so-called Management Gurus. Which lead to a bit of a dust up between Tom Peters and Jim Collins. There was talk about the lack of science behind Tom Peters MUST READ In Search of Excellence.
Peters responded by talking about ISOE in the simple way that only TP can do. ISOE and Collins’ Built to Last are two books that are must-reads for anyone trying to study management or generally improve their quality of work-life.
Both use a scientific method to determine results. Collins is an academic and feels his kung fu is better than Peters’.
ISOE ultimately proposes 7 things all great businesses do. Peters has, without much alteration over the last 30 years or so, maintained these concepts. In short, they are:
- MBWA – management by walking around. talk to THE people. Not the suits.
- Put PEOPLE first.
- “innovation through decentralization”
- Stay CLOSE to your customer
- CORE values (like Ray Kroc’s “QSCV” – quality, service, cleanliness, value)
- Doing it rather than talking about it ad naseum.
- Excellence! (per se)
These hold up. They are not complex. Stick to them and you will do fine. Simple. Yet IMPOSSIBLY difficult for MANY.
1 response so far ↓
1 Allison // May 8, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Mike,
You make some excellent points here. Since I’ve been working on my Master’s I have observed that academics want to find other academics that support what they believe. As a practitioner this frustrates me to a degree because I’ve worked in my field for about 10 years–I know stuff. As an academic, I have to find another academic who knows what I know and cite that reference or references, regardless of how common or common sense what I know or believe is.
That’s probably the biggest problem that the academics have with Peters, et al–they write common sense and it resonates with the people reading it. It has been a long time since I have read Peters, but I have always found him to be highly readable and the 7 messages you cited are so critical. I think we both know people who don’t do these and the results (or lack of them) show in performance.
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