Tom Peters discusses his experiences in the world of business and the nature of entrepreneurship.
Confessions of a big-company man
I n Search of Excellence had no such name, and I had no book contract, on the day it was born in February 1979. The wind-chill factor, as I recall, made the temperature about 70 degrees below zero. I had flown into the Twin Cities on a red-eye from San Francisco and, after a quick shower, had taken a cab to St. Paul, arriving almost on time for my morning interview with Tait Elder, then head of the new-ventures division at 3M Co.
Three years later, in the book's "A Bias for Action" chapter, Bob Waterman and I tried to capture what I saw and felt that day. Something about the place was different, beginning with Elder himself, a Fortune 500 division general manager who acted like a person and was treated like a mortal. He sat in a small, open office with four-foot-high partitions. People who weren't even vice-presidents dropped by unannounced, just to chat. Problems were handled in seconds, with nary a "send me a memo" or a "let's set a meeting on that." After a decade I am still at a loss trying to describe how strange these goings-on struck me at the time.
My world, after all, was the Fortune 500, whose minions I had served as a consultant for McKinsey & Co. since the early 1970s. Those were the days, moreover, when GM's market share was still close to 50%; IBM had nearly 70% of the large-scale computer market; and no one in the Kodak Tower could even pronounce the word Fuji. I myself had been working closely with Xerox Corp., which owned roughly 100% of the copier market and from a distance looked fairly similar to 3M. Inside, however, they had nothing in common.
I remember, for example, a week I spent shadowing a Xerox executive whose title was something like vice-president for strategic pricing. Every morning he would find on his desk an index card listing all the day's meetings (usually close to a dozen), including three or four pre-meetings with a few $70,000 staffers to prepare him for the real meetings. My report on the week thus became a tally of endless meetings, along with a list of decisions delayed, made, and then in more than 90% of the cases overturned.
That was Xerox in the mid-1970s: a hopelessly sluggish bureaucracy. It attracted world-class analytic talents, the best and the brightest, and put them on committees where they spent their time analyzing the wrong stuff. They agonized over incursions by IBM and Eastman Kodak at the high end of the copier market, for instance, and overlooked what was happening at the other end, where such companies as Savin and Canon were making their mark. The analyses were brilliant, no question. And they always led to more brilliant analyses and then brilliant counteranalyses. What they didn't lead to was action, and action was what I saw at 3M.
But why? What was it that gave 3M its "bias for action"? What made it look, smell, and feel so different from its Fortune 500 peers? How did it get that way, and was it possible for the others to change? What would it take for them to do it, and what would happen if they didn't?
In one form or another, those are the questions I've been struggling with for the past 10 years. Along the way, I've gone from bubbling optimism to near despair and back so many times that I'm dizzy -- and I'm still not sure what I think. Lately, however, I've begun to examine the questions in a new light. As I've watched what is happening both here and abroad, I've noticed a theme emerging, a single economic issue around which most of the others seem to coalesce. Looking back, I sometimes wonder why it took me so long to see it.
I'd probably have to go all the way back to Vietnam to find the beginning of the thread -- back to my U.S. Navy Seabee battalion in Da Nang, where I served as an assistant operations officer and ensign in 1966 and 1967. It was there that I received one of my earliest lessons in organizational dynamics. The Viet Cong had overrun a nearby Army Special Forces camp, and my battalion was ordered to form three detachments to go into the hills and build hardened camps for Special Forces outfits in our area.
The job wasn't a day at the beach, but I still remember the spirit and productivity of our 50-man teams. Later I took a 30-man detachment on a hut-building assignment for the Marines near the city of Hue. Such a group would usually complete 20 to 25 huts a week. After just two weeks we were averaging 75 and (with the promise of a rare day off as an incentive) hit the 107 mark in the fourth week. We liked breaking records and enjoyed one another's company.
But the world of the Seabees was not my lot for long. A couple of good overseas tours landed me in Washington, where I spent the last two years of my navy career at the Pentagon. It was quite a change. Room after room was chockablock with former combat battalion, air squadron, and destroyer commanders now spending their days passing papers back and forth, up and down. What a waste. After all, these guys were a lot like the ones with whom I'd broken hut-building records in Vietnam. What was the difference? Why did people who were so productive in one setting become such bureaucrats in another?
I found it a paradox, and the memory of it stayed with me in the years following my discharge from the navy. Along the way, a pair of Stanford business degrees and a stint as President Nixon's White House drug adviser crept onto my resume. While completing my Ph.D. dissertation, I started to work at McKinsey, and the question presented itself again.
To be honest, it came up as a kind of afterthought. McKinsey wasn't much interested in such issues back then. By 1977 we were thoroughly caught up in the strategy craze that was sweeping the world of big-time consulting. The prevailing wisdom held that clever strategies were the key to business success; everything else was subordinate, including people and organization. But while we were having no trouble devising all kinds of clever strategies, our clients were having a devil of a time trying to implement them. The question was, why?
