Management Guru In Search Of Reticence Peters’ Principle Is Perpetual Change

Searching for excellence has become something of a cottage industry in Spokane.

For more than a decade, organizations and movements known as Momentum, Vision Spokane and New Century Plan have worked to bring together the community and map a better future.

So it was with alarming simplicity that one of the world’s most popular management consultants issued his recommendation for success Wednesday in as few words as a Jack in the Box commercial.

“Blow yourself up,” Tom Peters said while visiting Spokane, “before the competition does it for you.”

In his trademark take-no-prisoners style, the author of “In Search of Excellence” and “The Pursuit of Wow!” blasted stodgy corporate leaders before a crowd of 600 spellbound men and women who were ill-prepared for an onslaught of Peters’ profane, but honest, philosophy.

Communities spend countless energy cheering when they recruit a new company with 100 employees, Peters said.

But they should worry about the economic force of 1.7 billion Asians who will enter the work force for the first time during the next two decades.

Peters criticized traditional American business practices, corporate mergers and some local icons for demonstrating a lack of innovation. He declared that Hewlett-Packard’s rebound in recent years taught nothing about successful management, and Boeing has merged with “dinosaur” McDonnell Douglas.

“I guess it (Boeing) was tired of success,” Peters said, shaking his head as a spotlight followed his nervous pacing like a pendulum across the floor of the Spokane Convention Center.

Rather than getting larger, Peters said, companies and organizations should be decentralizing and unleashing their talent in smaller divisions and start-ups. They should become as innovative as Sony Corp., which pumps out product prototypes five days after they are conceived.

“It’s imperative that we take the blinders off and get extremely clear about the steepness of the hill of change we need to climb,” he said. “You can’t climb the hill on an apple a day and two aspirin.”

Other companies and organizations should simply dismantle, forget the old ways and start over, Peters suggested.

“How many of you have a formal ‘forgetting strategy’?” he asked to a show of no hands. “All you really need to know about business strategy can be summarized in the seven words of the chairman of MCI: ‘Run like mad and then change direction.”’

Peters, a trained civil engineer, is the best selling business author in the world. His appearance in Spokane was sponsored by Eastern Washington University College of Business and Public Administration.

For the most part, the diverse crowd of men and women, aging chief executives and soft-skinned college graduates loved Peters’ ideas, insults and all.

Maybe it was the paid day off to spend in blue jeans that ignited the crowd; maybe it was the cathartic experience of seeing the boss - who paid $300 for each employee to attend the seminar - humbled by a 54-year-old man with the alphabet printed on his tie.

Whatever the case, the audience sensed truth in Peters’ message.

“I really believe him,” said 23-year-old Matt Stoddard of Empire Beverage, a Spokane wine distributor. “If you’re not always changing your company, it’s not going to succeed.”

Dr. Barbara Hetrick drove with three others from the Veteran’s Hospital in Walla Walla to hear Peters. She’s part of a 35-person team trying to reorganize the institution to become more competitive with private medical centers. Hetrick wondered how her team could initiate important changes without disrupting the hospital’s other 265 employees.

“Telling people that destruction can be a good thing is challenging,” she said. “A lot of people sign on for a career and are not comfortable with change.”

But like it or not, change is what the world is about, Peters said.

“This is absolutely, positively, unequivocally an unbelievable crazy time,” he said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Peters’ advice “Technology is changing everything and not one person in this room gets it … (since) there is no one under age 13 here.” “The nerds have won. But we don’t know much about nerd management.” “Bad ideas kill themselves off. Good ideas have been done before. Crazy ideas are innovative.”