Keeping Track: Cino tapes quotes and anecdotes from his reading, then intersperses them with brief Step Ahead ads to play for callers on hold. "We've had people request that they get back on hold; they wanted to hear the rest of the story."
GEORGE N. HATSOPOULOS
Age: 63
Occupation: chairman, president, and founder of the Waltham, Mass.-based Thermo Electron Corp., a $579-million manufacturer of heat-transfer and energy-conversion products.
Education: Ph.D. in mechanical engineering
Recommended Reading: The Age of Diminished Expectations: U.S. Economic Policy in the 1990s by Paul Krugman
Why: "We cannot automatically expect the growth in the standard of living and the economy that we've seen in the past will take place without making some hard choices. This book is very informative about those choices, and it's not very technical."
Reading that Helps Me Run the Company: Now that his company is large, Hatsopoulos sees one of his main duties as looking at the big picture, both economically and technologically. In that role, he can keep his managers up-to-date while they concentrate on running the business. His job, he feels, requires staying abreast of current events, as well as many scientific and economic papers. "A lot of the planning that we're doing does relate to how we visualize the future," he says. "If you make an error, it will cost you a lot." Hatsopoulos uses what he's learned about economics, for example, to better evaluate the many varied forecasts that economists produce.
TOM PETERS
Age: 47
Occupation: founder, The Tom Peters Group, a $10-million consulting and training-products company in Palo Alto, Calif. Wrote Thriving on Chaos; coauthor of In Search of Excellence and A Passion for Excellence.
Education: M.B.A. and Ph.D. in business
Recommended Reading: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
Why: "If you want to construct a good R&D strategy, take your favorite textbook on R&D planning and burn it and reread The Soul of a New Machine. It's business anthropology, a good, rich explanation of the mess and confusion of organization life."
The Soul of a New Machine isn't Peters's favorite business book, however. That, The Social Psychology of Organizing by Karl E. Weick, isn't one he recommends for popular consumption. "It's a thin, very academic text that I read in 1971. It set everything I thought I knew about anything from a professional perspective totally on its ear; it was just so completely antithetical to the great traditions of organizational thinking. A lot of it is stuff that today lesser mortals call corporate culture. The corporate-culture thing has been so simplified, cheapened, bastardized -- but what Weick was writing was the real true grit without the phony labels."
Peters thinks Kidder's book deals with the same issues in a more readable fashion. "Kidder is doing, Kidder is operationalizing what Weick is writing about -- without creating the theoretical tangle. Then you put the two together, and you've got magic."
Reading Plan: If we could lay out Tom Peters's reading plan, we figured, that would really give INC. readers some ideas to think about. There's just one catch: there isn't one. "I am mortally and morally opposed to the idea that there should be a plan," says Peters. "I find that idea disgusting because 90% of what I find that's interesting comes from someplace other than where it's supposed to come from. So I take perverse pride in being a garbageman of the first order." That means skimming management books and countless trade magazines, looking for case studies of interesting companies -- and not worrying until much later about how to organize them.
Peters argues that innovation in ideas is like innovation in companies -- a disorderly process that never takes place as planned. "The whole problem I have with pattern is that you're ready to read things at certain times and not at others." He cites the example of Future Perfect by Stanley M. Davis, which he put down unfinished in 1987. Two years later he picked it up and found it one of the most important business books of the decade.
Keeping Track: Putting down and picking up a book after two years may sound in keeping with the author of Thriving on Chaos. But how does Peters organize his clippings until he's ready to read them?
Generally, he doesn't. Peter's main organizing principle is the pile -- piles of books lying around, piles of papers waiting for the time to be right. Most of the piles aren't structured, "but I have a pretty good feel in my head as to what's in them." Gradually the piles spill over into file boxes, and when it's time to write, Peters plows through them with a dictating machine. For his current book, there were about 10 boxes, yielding 400 to 500 pages of notes. Although Peters plans his books before he goes stack searching, he is "disappointed if the process of going through the piles doesn't change them dramatically," he says.
ANDREW PLATA
Age: 42
Occupation: CEO, Computer Output Printing Inc., a 23-employee electronic-printing company in Houston.
Education: B.S. in math
Recommended Reading: The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz
Why: Plata read the book when he was 22, and it changed his view of life, he says. "I'm Hispanic, and I grew up in an environment where the way you sought happiness was to limit your expectation level. I was reared around people who spent all their time telling themselves to be satisfied with what they had; in fact, it was socially incorrect to aspire to more. And that book said, no, the way to seek happiness is to accelerate your expectation level and then allow yourself and all your talents to catch up to that level. It was a whole new paradigm for me."
Reading that Helps Me Run the Company: "I probably give and pass out as many books as some small bookstores," Plata jokes. His employees, for example, all received a copy of I Know It When I See It by John Guaspari. "We use that throughout our company as a bible on quality. And there's no excuse for not reading it because it can't take you longer than a lunch hour." Plata also requires that employees choose books they want to read as part of their annual goals.
