Still Angry After All These Years

What is most obviously fresh and exciting about this book is the design. Irked at Knopf, Peters dropped the imprint for Dorling Kindersley, a London-based unit of Pearson best known for its visually stunning travel and gardening books. "The whole point of what we've been doing is trying to make the medium as interesting as we hope the message is. You can't write about WOW projects in Technicolor times," he says, without presenting the information that way.

It's easy to understand Peters's Technicolor vision when you spend some time in his surroundings. The farmhouse Peters shares with his wife, designer Susan Sargent, is a cacophonous and joyous explosion of color. Sargent's sensibility is all about the feelings unleashed by unusual combinations of unalike colors. Chartreuse meets blood orange meets robin's egg blue in Peters's own household, and that same shock of the visually unexpected makes its business debut in Re-imagine!. In fact, it was Sargent who first suggested working with Dorling Kindersley.

Visually, the collaboration has been a stunning success. The book looks like a magazine, with arresting photographs of people, buildings, and technologies, plus numbers, exclamation points, and perhaps a few too many shots of Peters expressing a gamut of emotions, from bemused to enraged. His habit of yelling through the use of capital letters is somehow more palatable when they're displayed in cherry red font (the Brand Called Tom's special tint). It is perhaps the first business book that people will actually display on their coffee tables.

Oddly, for a book whose author's name is synonymous with the term "change agent," Re-imagine! seems to eschew the notion of personal transformation. Organizations, he says, can be changed if you find and nourish the fringe lurkers and geeks. "FIND THE FREAKS! SIGN 'EM UP! MAKE 'EM YOUR PARTNERS! LET 'EM HELP YOU MAKE REVOLUTION!" he writes. But people, he now maintains, can't be changed. "No, no, no! Never," he says, gathering steam. This is a strange statement coming from someone who gives 70-odd speeches a year -- some at $65,000 a pop -- on such subjects as "boss-free implementation" and "business excellence in a disruptive age," to the likes of the Equipment Leasing Association and Wal-Mart. "You don't change people. You get damned lucky and catch them at the right moment and they pay attention, but whatever they had when they walked in the door is what they walk out the door with."

The ironic part of all this is that Peters is now on his own quest for change. He has just returned from a visit to Canyon Ranch, that cult of personal transformation that masquerades as a spa. While there, he got a full-scale workup -- and the verdict on Peters was as damning as the one he routinely delivers to companies: Change NOW.

Changing his compulsive approach to work, however, is a different story. It goes without saying that being pissed off all the time isn't on Canyon Ranch's recommended list of stress-release activities. "Large doses of adrenaline surging routinely through the system are not good for you," Peters admits. "I'm supposed to be calm now." He now indulges in a deep-breathing exercise that he runs on his computer, and he plans to swap his normal jumping jacks for breath control before he gives a presentation. But he still gives assistants fits by changing everything at the absolute last moment. "There is a moment of truth at 2 or 3 a.m.," he says. It comes when he sees himself "looking into these 3,000 faces who own hardware stores or who are partners at Deloitte & Touche or what have you. And then the whole bloody presentation has to be changed."

Peters becomes wistful when asked what he would do if he didn't have to live life as a human exclamation point but could instead opt to be a simple comma -- if he could jettison Tom Peters and start all over. "I don't have a clue," he says. "I've often said I envy Franklin Roosevelt and his stamp collection. And Churchill had his painting. I don't know what I would do. I have no idea." So the quest continues: Find that one person in a thousand. Do work you love. Remain a player. And stay mad at the world.

Sidebar: The Peters Principles

A sampling of some of the most important themes covered in Tom Peters's new book, Re-imagine!

1. Destroy to Create
   Forget about Built to Last. All companies, Peters says, are doomed to failure. Better to completely destroy your own company from the inside and remake it in a new, bold and creative way than fight old battles with old ideas -- and eventually fade away into irrelevance.
2. Women Roar
   They are the most important group in our economy. They spend and make most of the money. They make the key financial decisions. And yet they are talked down to, never designed for, not consulted, fundamentally ignored. The New Economy runs on the principles that women are used to -- collaboration rather than command and control, for one -- and until men realize that and change their approach, they are doomed to failure.
3. It's an XF (Cross-functional) World
   Nothing works without honest and open communication between decision makers. So you can be as idealistic and as big picture as you like, but you won't get anywhere without the human element. Peters says it's best to embrace the politics and demolish the red tape. Only then can you move on to the greater objectives of changing your company.
4. Power Dreaming
   Successful companies such as Harley-Davidson and Starbucks work because they sell a lifestyle or an image rather than simply a product. For Harley, it's the experience of the rebel; for Starbucks, it's a place of refuge. Successful companies must offer a "scintillating experience" in order to set themselves apart in an environment where most competitors already provide a decent product.
5. Think Weird
   The only way to effect true transformation in the workplace, says Peters, is to enlist the outliers in your organization to join your cause. Find the weirdos and the freaks, offer support for the projects they're secretly pursuing, then get them to help you with your own revolutionary change ideas.
6. Design, the ultimate edge
   In the world of Tom Peters, design is so critical that it should be on the agenda (along with a professional designer) of every meeting in every single department. Design, like lifestyle, is one of the few differentiating factors, and companies that ignore the power of elegant and functional design will lose.

Jennifer Reingold (jreingold@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer.