Still Angry After All These Years

It's time to make hay on Tom Peters's 1,400-acre farm in rural West Tinmouth, Vermont. As the farmhands collect bale after bale of fresh hay on this brilliant summer day, the warm sun splashes through the window of Peters's airy farmhouse study, illuminating the entire wall of bookshelves stacked tight with iterations of Peters's 10 books translated into languages from Russian to Japanese. The breeze is calming. The scent of wildflowers wafts through the air. The birds are singing. There's probably even a babbling brook around here somewhere. In short, it's a perfectly idyllic day in what should be the perfectly contented life of one of the world's best-known management thinkers.

"What an ass!" Peters explodes. He's talking about Peter Olson, CEO of Random House, whose Machiavel- lian approach to management was recently described in excruciating detail in The New York Times Magazine. "Someone who takes pleasure in firing like that, it's unbelievable!"

Less than 10 minutes later, the volcano erupts again as Peters talks about his disappointment with a three-book series he published a few years ago. It wasn't the sales that bugged him -- he says they hit around 350,000 -- but how the series was perceived. "I thought it sucked, basically," he exclaims. "It didn't have any impact."

Not to make an impact when you are, among other things, the coauthor of one of the most popular business books ever written (In Search of Excellence, HarperCollins, 1982) would certainly be a maddening experience. For a man whose every sentence, including possibly "pass the salt," is uttered with the utmost urgency, it is infuriating. But then fury is something Peters knows how to work with.

Now 60 and a millionaire many times over, Peters could be excused if he wanted to float lazily in his spring-fed pond and spend his days with the sheep, the goats, the alpaca, and the two glorious mountains looming outside his window. Frankly, he doesn't have a whole lot to complain about. But for Peters, getting worked up, annoyed, irritated, steamed, and outraged is the standard MO. It's the way he gets things done. Even his method of dictating the first drafts of his books into a microcassette recorder is to rant. "I'm pissed off at life," he says. "Plus, I happen to believe that only pissed-off people change the world, either in small ways or large ways."

And although he likes to act as if he couldn't care less, changing the world is exactly what he's trying to do in his 11th book, Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age (Dorling Kindersley). The first "big book" he has written since Circle of Innovation (Knopf) in 1997, the 352-page tome is basically the unabridged Tom Peters on anything to do with business, from leadership to brands to technology. You've seen or heard about parts of it before, some of it in these pages: ideas such as Brand You and the notion that information technology changes everything in our world. Other aspects, such as the book's beautiful design and Peters's willingness to step back and take a fresh look at the organization in addition to his traditional focus on the individual, are new. Yet this book, coming at a time when many of the New Economy tenets he was best associated with have been discarded, also comes at a critical point for Peters himself. Can his ideas still have impact in a new, far more cynical age?

In Re-imagine! Peters envisions his own epitaph, as some 60-year-olds are wont to do. It will read, he fervently hopes:

Thomas J. Peters
1942 -- Whenever
He Was a Player

"In other words," he continues, "He did not sit on the sidelines . . . and watch the world go by . . . as it was undergoing the most profound shift of basic premises in the last several hundred years (if not the last thousand or so years)." The line is vintage Peters, complete with his trademark grandiosity, enthusiasm, and those infernal parentheses. But the epitaph, at least, will prove true, no matter whether you see him as a brilliant thinker who keeps beating the rest of us to the future, a guy who got lucky with his first book and then went off the deep end, or something in between. Tom Peters was -- and is -- a player.

In person, Peters is far funnier, less pc, more irreverent and gentler than his uber-punctuated way of writing and public speaking conveys. He still gets mad, obviously, but isn't opposed to conceding a point here or there, or sharing a belly laugh over some of his own excesses. Dressed in a cutoff green sweatshirt, dirty shorts, and hiking boots, Peters, with metal glasses slightly askew, looks more as if he'd spent the afternoon lording it over the weeds in his backyard on a power mower than living the life of "the most influential business thinker of the age," according to his press kit, and the second most prominent business intellectual in the world (after Michael Porter), according to an Accenture study. The refreshing thing about Peters the man is that even if his words are idealistic, he is unabashedly real.

"Wouldn't you like to think that a quiet leader will lead you to the promised land? I think it's total utter bull, because I consider this to be a time of chaos."