Tom Peters's True Confessions

A few years before Search came out, two Harvard Business School professors, Bill Abernathy and Bob Hayes, had written a brilliant article in the Harvard Business Review called "Managing Our Way to Economic Decline." It was an attack on the whole HBS view of the world -- and only two HBS professors could have written it and gotten it published in HBR. Only two McKinsey consultants could have launched a wholesale attack on numbers-crunching, bureaucracy-worshipping, strategy-making big American companies and gotten away with it.

(Revolutionaries take note! Charles Darwin said that when species change too quickly, there will be little chance for their survival. But a very few will become the bellwethers -- and redefine the world.)

Here's a confession that will only mean something to the Oakland Raiders football fans of the late 1970s: I owe it all to Mark van Eeghen. (And if you weren't an Oakland Raiders fan and you never saw Mark van Eeghen play football, all I can say is, that's your tough luck.)

Mark van Eeghen was a big, strong, in-your-face, three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust running back for the Raiders. We were about to run around 10,000 copies of our report, and we needed a picture for the cover. We had originally taken a picture right out of Sports Illustrated, but at the last minute, we decided that we couldn't steal from SI at that level. So we went across the bay to the Raiders' office and looked through their archive, and we found the perfect image: a photo featuring Mark van Eeghen.

It was perfect in a lot of ways. The photo said three yards and a cloud of dust, and our book said the same thing: Love thy people. Love thy customers. Keep it simple. Lean staff, simple organization. Get the bureaucrats out of the bloody way. Pay attention to the "real" people with dirty fingernails. That was the Oakland Raiders. They were the guys flying the Jolly Roger. They were the pirates, the underdogs. Al Davis, their renegade owner, always preached, "Just win, baby," and his avowed message was . . . "Commitment to excellence."

We got it right when we said that we were in search of excellence. Not competitive advantage. Not economic growth. Not market dominance or strategic differentiation. Not maximized shareholder value. Excellence. It's just as true today. Business isn't some disembodied bloodless enterprise. Profit is fine -- a sign that the customer honors the value of what we do. But "enterprise" (a lovely word) is about heart. About beauty. It's about art. About people throwing themselves on the line. It's about passion and the selfless pursuit of an ideal. It's about John Young sitting in his little cubicle working in his shirtsleeves. It's cool. In Search of Excellence -- even the title -- is a reminder that business isn't dry, dreary, boring, or by the numbers. Life at work can be cool -- and work that's cool isn't confined to Tiger Woods, Yo-Yo Ma, or Tom Hanks. It's available to all of us and any of us.

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