Tom Peters's True Confessions

Search started out as a study of 62 companies. How did we come up with them? We went around to McKinsey's partners and to a bunch of other smart people who were deeply involved and seriously engaged in the world of business and asked, Who's cool? Who's doing cool work? Where is there great stuff going on? And which companies genuinely get it? That very direct approach generated a list of 62 companies, which led to interviews with the people at those companies. Then, because McKinsey is McKinsey, we felt that we had to come up with some quantitative measures of performance. Those measures dropped the list from 62 to 43 companies. General Electric, for example, was on the list of 62 companies but didn't make the cut to 43 -- which shows you how "stupid" raw insight is and how "smart" tough-minded metrics can be.

Were there companies that, in retrospect, didn't belong on the list of 43? I only have one word to say: Atari.

Was our process fundamentally sound? Absolutely! If you want to go find smart people who are doing cool stuff from which you can learn the most useful, cutting-edge principles, then do what we did with Search: Start by using common sense, by trusting your instincts, and by soliciting the views of "strange" (that is, nonconventional) people. You can always worry about proving the facts later.

All right, here's another confession. When I said that I didn't know what I was doing when I wrote Search, I was telling the truth. I wasn't trying to fire a shot to signal a revolution. But I did have an agenda. My agenda was this: I was genuinely, deeply, sincerely, and passionately pissed off! (So what's the point? Just this: Nearly 100% of innovation -- from business to politics -- is inspired not by "market analysis" but by people who are supremely pissed off by the way things are.)

Who was I pissed off at? At Peter Drucker, for one. Today, everybody acts as if Peter Drucker has always been one of those who gets it. Go back and read Concept of the Corporation. Peter Drucker may be an Austrian, but he's more German than the Germans when it comes to hierarchy and command-and-control, top-down business operation. Take a look at the business bible according to Peter Drucker, and you'll see. Organizations are about organization! You vill be in your place! That was the received order of the day. So, in my mind, Peter Drucker was the enemy. A good enemy, but still the enemy.

Who else? I was supremely pissed off at Robert McNamara. McNamara had been an assistant accounting professor at Harvard Business School. Somebody hooked him up with General Curtis E. LeMay, who was running the U.S. Air Force. The way I remember the story, LeMay didn't know how many airplanes he had or where they were parked. So McNamara the accountant figured out how many planes there were and where they were parked, and he put together a report for LeMay. All of a sudden, where there had been no systems, McNamara introduced systems. Terrific. That makes McNamara the Peter Drucker of the Pentagon -- because Drucker had done the same thing for big companies. But by the time the Vietnam War came and McNamara was secretary of defense, the systems had completely taken over. People were driven out of the equation. McNamara introduced the tyranny of the bean counters. So Robert McNamara was the enemy.

But mostly I was pissed off at Xerox. David Kearns was the company's CEO at the time, and I had been a consultant there. Xerox was considered to be the company of the century, but I knew better. There it was, all in one place: the bureaucracy, the great strategy that never got implemented, the slavish attention to numbers rather than to people, the reverence for MBAs -- you name it. If it could be done wrong, Xerox was doing it wrong. Of course, there were other giant American companies that were just as bad: Chase Manhattan Bank, Western Electric, and most of McKinsey's typical clients. But Xerox epitomized the problem. In fact, when I was there, the guy I worked for, who was a former McKinsey partner named Jack Crowley, later went on to be head of corporate strategy for Xerox. He did a study called a "cliff analysis." What it showed was that Xerox was about to drive off the edge of a cliff. The problem for David Kearns was that, as CEO, he couldn't be the guy to announce that his own company was about to go over the cliff.

So here it is: If you want to reduce Search to a core message, that message would be this: Xerox sucks.

Here's my fifth confession: Search went against all of the Management 101 -- style conventional thinking that was running American business back in 1981. But that's not the confession. The confession is that I didn't go far enough.