Tom Peters, co-author of the 1982 mega-seller “In Search of Excellence,” has a new book, “The Circle of Innovation: You Can’t Shrink Your Way to Greatness.” Here’s what he had to say during a recent interview before one of his popular seminars:
Q–How can people deal with downsizing?
A–You can deal with what’s going on in the world as a jerk or you can deal with it thoughtfully. But what you can’t do is make the world turn down in terms of the speed with which it’s spinning.
We’ve been through 20 years of dislocation. Given the new technologies, we’ve got another 25, 30, 35 years ahead of us of dislocation. We are literally going through a transformation that’s as big as the Industrial Revolution, and we’re seeing some phenomenal winners in terms of workers as well as the Bill Gateses of the world, and a hell of a lot of losers.
Q–What is the most important thing that businesses in general have learned in the last 20 years?
A–I think the most important thing we’ve learned is you don’t just hire a million people when business is good and fire them when business is bad.
You want to have a solid core of phenomenally talented employees in whom you invest a great deal. You don’t want a million extra bodies in good times and you don’t want to throw a million extra bodies out in the bad times.
Q–In terms of innovation, is there a single thing people must keep in mind?
A–I’m arguing that the good news of downsizing is that your boss is likely to get fired before you do, so devoting 80 percent of your time to sucking up is not quite the effective strategy it was 20 years ago.
One of the things I have observed is that there is almost sort of a break in the audience (for my seminars). I call it “the under-37-over-37 break.” The over-37s kind of still harbor a distant hope that maybe all this will go away and we’ll get back to lifetime employment at USX, Westinghouse, what have you.
My message is, “It ain’t gonna go away. You have to be in charge of your career. You’ve got to be the person who’s creating interesting projects.”
Q–Are things more uncertain today?
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A–I think they are. There’s an incredible amount of hype about the future, but I do think, despite the apparently big hiccups in Asia, that we really are living in a global village where the staff professional at Mellon Bank is really competing against people who can do those backroom services in Bangalore, India.
I really do think the new technologies are going to expose the Dilbertish, white-collar inefficiencies as much as the robots exposed the inefficiencies on the factory floor. We’ve never attacked white-collar productivity.