Still Angry After All These Years

And he is not about to concede defeat. Even as the beautiful future Peters promised us fades in the rearview mirror like a town we never visited, Peters is hard at work repelling the attackers, thrilled, he claims, to be a contrarian again. "So what [if] 98% of the dotcom companies failed? Some of them didn't," he says. "I believe that the New Economy is real. I believe the technology change is just in its infancy." Although he acknowledges that the sort of free agency he championed has become more of a nasty surprise than a liberating choice these days, the notion that you and only you are responsible for your career is more important than ever. "You don't go more than two weeks without seeing that IBM or GE or somebody else is shipping more $100,000 jobs -- not $30,000 jobs -- offshore," he says. "And so the Darwinian Brand You, every person for themselves, now it's an imperative. It's very different from being cool . . . but the path out is the same whether you got there voluntarily or involuntarily."

True enough. But will people pick up and read a cool, inspirational treatise when the reason they're free agents is that they've been canned? That's the challenge of Re-imagine!, which will be published on October 15. It is in some ways a departure for Peters and in other ways a continuation of the same quirks, writing tics, and moments of brilliance that have defined his previous work.

Re-imagine! is most definitely a New Economy book, replete with an unshakable belief that the changes of the past decade or so have permanently transformed the world of work; the book is infused with an optimism that things can and will be better. Those who accuse Peters of lacking relevance and rigor are not going to change their tune this time around. The word WOW isn't as omnipresent as it's been in the past, but it's still there -- complete with capital letters, the ubiquitous exclamation points, and the ideology that action beats the pants off sitting around and thinking about action. In Tom's World, it's always better to try a swan dive and deliver a colossal belly flop than to step timidly off the board while holding your nose. Each chapter starts with a "Rant" warning that "We are not prepared" for some massive change -- either the coming "stupendous" information-technology adventure or the fact that design will soon be the "Seat of the Soul." Then comes Peters's vision for that theme, such as a new approach to education or a finance department peopled with poets and musicians.

In contrast with such broad visions, Peters's most recent efforts have been focused on narrower subjects. In 1999, for example, there was The Professional Service Firm 50 (Knopf), a book aimed at energizing the accountants and lawyers of the world. In fact, he originally wanted to do a series of small books, but publisher Dorling Kindersley insisted on starting with the "big think" book, to be followed by a 24-book series. And so Re-imagine! is big and unwieldy, trying to tie together the various elements of Peters's thinking, such as the brutally ignored economic power of women, which gets two passionate chapters, and the essential fact that without decent human interaction, none of his inspirational ideas are ever going to work. His view is nothing less than the following: We must destroy virtually all our business organizations and reimagine them, just as Donald Rumsfeld is trying to do with the U.S. military, in order to respond to the new technological and social imperatives of our era. If we don't, he says, we are dead. It's as simple as that.

Although Peters's work reveals plenty of contradictions, most of which he'll readily admit, the one thread binding everything together is passion. Unlike many of his more abstract competitors in the field of management, with Peters it all comes down to one thing and one thing only -- the folks. "I like to take the same set of ideas and look at them from the ground perspective," he says. "All these strategy guys -- Porter, [Clayton] Christensen -- they talk wonderfully about these ideas and then blithely skip over the incredibly boring part called people."

Leadership, and particularly bold leaders who thrive on "paradox" and "the mess," writes Peters, are desperately needed in a postffiSeptember 11 world where the virtual organization has gone from consultant-speak to reality in the form of a bunch of Al Qaeda terrorists armed with box cutters. It's the opposite viewpoint of Peters's archrival Jim Collins, whose most recent book, Good to Great (HarperCollins, 2001), has hit the perfect tone for this risk-averse age. "It's calming," says Peters, as he fumes about Collins's "stoic, quiet, calm leaders. 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."