Tom Peters's True Confessions

My second confession is this: I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote Search. There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove. I went out and talked to genuinely smart, remarkably interesting, first-rate people. I had an infinite travel budget that allowed me to fly first class and stay at top-notch hotels and a license from McKinsey to talk to as many cool people as I could all around the United States and the world.

I went to see Karl Weick, who had totally influenced my life. I had read his work a thousand times, and I'd never met him. I went to Oslo to talk with Einar Thorsrud, who had studied empowerment on oil tankers. I went to the Tavistock Institute in London, where the leading thinkers on organizational development were looking at why people work together effectively in team configurations under certain circumstances.

I was scratching the Douglas McGregor itch. Warren Bennis, another hero of mine, says that it all starts with Doug, and he's probably right. Doug was the guy who invented Theory X and Theory Y, which basically said that people are a really important part of business and that you can't motivate them by controlling and tyrannizing them. Everybody knew that what he said was true, and everybody continued to treat their workers like shit -- and then kept asking why companies didn't perform better. (Note to reader: Hmm. Is it time for these questions again? Naw -- most of our top managers have already learned this stuff, right?)

That was basically it. I traveled the world, met smart people, and recorded the meetings. There were all of these conversations, all of these interviews, and all of these transcripts -- pounds and pounds of transcripts. Then in 1979, McKinsey's Munich office had me come over and give a presentation on my findings to the top managers at Siemens. Siemens had the most hyperorganized strategy group on earth, so I couldn't just show up and start talking to them off the top of my head. In that best of consulting traditions, I made up a 700-slide, two-day presentation.

Word of the meeting got back to McKinsey USA, and I was invited to give a presentation to the top management of PepsiCo, which was then headed by Andy Pearson. (Andy was recently featured in a Fast Company article called "Andy Pearson Finds Love" [August 2001].) In those days, Andy had not found love. We all knew that he'd go ballistic at the sight of a 700-slide presentation. So here's what happened: The time was drawing near for the Pepsi presentation to take place. One morning at about 6, I sat down at my desk overlooking the San Francisco Bay from the 48th floor of the Bank of America Tower, and I closed my eyes. Then I leaned forward, and I wrote down eight things on a pad of paper. Those eight things haven't changed since that moment. They were the eight basic principles of Search.

What's the lesson here? There's nothing like being naive. I was almost 40 years old, and Bob was a little older. But we were both incredibly naive when we were doing this work. We were like little children looking at the world of big companies -- mighty U.S. leaders -- and we were asking the simplest questions. Why do you do it this way? Why do you keep tripping over your own bureaucratic feet? Why do you make it so hard for people to do their jobs?

There's another important "so what." Part of the beauty of Search is that we were able to do it because we weren't trying to do it. There's an almost Zen-like quality to the book. In fact, it makes the point that, when it comes to managing and controlling people, only by not trying do you succeed.

In Search of Excellence is a Zen gun that was fired 20 years ago. It said that from this point forward, the world changes. It's a different game, a different world, a different moment. It's never going to be the way it was -- and if you want to be a part of the way it's going to be, you have to read this book. You have to reckon with these ideas. We may not be right -- but we are fervently convinced that the old way is wrong. So starting now, you've got to think for yourselves. How do you compete, how do you collaborate, how do you use ideas, how do you use people, how do you play this new game where there are brand-new rules? Search was an inflection point -- a punctuation mark -- that signaled the end of one era and the beginning of another. And all of that is still true -- even truer.

Confession number three: This is pretty small beer, but for what it's worth, okay, I confess: We faked the data. A lot of people suggested it at the time. The big question was, How did you end up viewing these companies as "excellent" companies? A little while later, when a bunch of the "excellent" companies started to have some down years, that also became a huge accusation: If these companies are so excellent, Peters, then why are they doing so badly now? Which I'd say pretty much misses the point.