My Greatest Lesson

Anthony Robbins is an authority on the psychology of peak performance and on the art of the personal, professional, and organizational turnaround. In 1997, Robbins was named one of the 10 "Outstanding People of the World" by the International Chamber of Commerce. The Anthony Robbins Foundation, a nonprofit organization, has fed more than a quarter-million people in more than 200 cities worldwide.

Anne Sweeney
President
The Disney Channel
Burbank, California

Several years ago, I reached a proverbial career crossroads. It was then that I discovered the key ingredient in any decision-making process: passion. I had been at Nickelodeon for 12 years before joining Fox. Now my contract with Fox was up. I was thinking very hard about my next move when Geraldine Laybourne offered me the chance to run the Disney Channel. I'm very pragmatic in my approach to opportunities and problems. I'm a great list-maker. But this time, I put aside my lists and thought about the offer in personal terms. I asked myself, Would this job make my heart sing?

My family is my passion. This is not something that you hear a lot of executives say. But Gerry encouraged me to let my ideas and feelings about family inform all aspects of my work. If you let passion inform your decisions, you'll make good ones.

Gerry has been a wonderful mentor. She has a capacity to see your potential and to make sure that you see it. My mother is the same way. Once, when I was young, I was having a difficult time with my Latin homework. I complained to my mother about how hard it was. I told her that I wasn't as smart as she thought I was. My mother stopped what she was doing, looked me in the eye, and said, "You don't know how smart you are." Gerry echoes that message without knowing it. And I try to convey the same message to others.

At Fox, Anne Sweeney helped start the FX cable network, which became the most successful launch in cable history. The Disney Channel is one of the fastest-growing networks in cable, with more than 35 million subscribers.

Tom Peters
Founder
The Tom Peters Group
Palo Alto, California

Curiosity is my mantra. It's also my profession. Curiosity offers novel lenses for looking at the world. And the most high-powered lens I've discovered is variation, an idea that I learned from two of the best teachers I've ever encountered.

The late Gene Webb was my best friend, my best mentor, the best professor I had at Stanford Business School - and my dissertation adviser. Here was a man who earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in his early twenties. He passed on to me his reverence for the principle of variation: the idea that the message ain't in the mean, the mode, or the median - it's in the differences that occur throughout a population. The idea is interesting when you apply it to math problems, scientific investigations, or other academic inquiries. Apply it to startups, Web sites, employees, or customers, and it goes from "interesting" to "a matter of life and death!"

Stephen Jay Gould is the second person who taught me the power of variation. In his brilliant book Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (Harmony, 1996), Gould examines "life's bell-curve." He shows why Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak remains the most resilient and extraordinary achievement in sports, and why the absence of .400 hitters since Ted Williams's .406 in 1941 signals an improvement in skill, not the disappearance of truly great ballplayers.

The lesson here? When you hear about an "average" performance, an "average" score, or an "average" result - whether it's return on equity, customer satisfaction, or employee turnover - remember to ask: How tight is the distribution? (Is the curve flat or bell-shaped?) What's the skew? (Where does the center of the distribution fall?) Keep asking those questions, and you'll become a convert - a variation freak. You'll never look at the world the same way again.

Tom Peters describes himself as a gadfly, a curmudgeon, a prince of disorder, a champion of bold failures, and a professional loudmouth. He is also the author of In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies (with Robert Waterman, Harper & Row, 1982) and Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution (Random House, 1987).

Peter Guber
Chairman
Mandalay Entertainment
Culver City, California

Sometimes life is all about solving problems. In the movie business, at least, there seems to be one around every corner. One of the most effective lessons I've learned about tackling problems is to start by asking not "How to?" but rather "What if?" I learned that lesson from a young woman who was interning on a film that I was producing. She actually saved the movie from being shelved by the studio.