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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?