India's leading management portal MBAUniverse.com has tied-up with UK based Thinkers 50, to present this global ranking. Read on to discover what makes these two such icons.
Tom Peters: Excellence activist
Tom Peters (b. 1942) is a native of Baltimore. He studied engineering at Cornell, before heading to the west coast to get his MBA and PhD at Stanford. He saw active service in the Vietnam War with the US Navy. In the mid 1970s he joined McKinsey as a consultant, leaving in 1981 to set up his own firm, now part of the Tom Peters Group.
In 1982 appeared In Search of Excellence (written with Robert Waterman, a fellow McKinsey partner). This became the best-selling management book of the twentieth century - the first to reach the best-seller charts. This was soon followed by the nearly as successful A Passion for Excellence (1985).
The book has achieved a cult following. It tied in with the need in the United States in the early 1980s to feel good about being American again. It showed that significant parts of American industry and business were excellent; others could be too. Its simplistic rhetoric earned Peters a wrap over the knuckles from the venerable Peter Drucker. He chided Peters for making "managing sound so incredibly easy. All you have to do is put that book under your pillow and it will get done."
In Search of Excellence was an American classic. It contained really great stories of do-and-dare about 43 excellent American companies. It was not long on theorising. It is liberally spruced with nuggets of home-spun wisdom: "If a window of opportunity appears, don't pull down the shade."
Excellence in business depends on eight ingredients:
(1) activism, with people who "do it, fix it [and] try it"
(2) excellent companies "learn from the people they serve".
(3) they promote entrepreneurship and autonomy
(4) management learns from a "hands-on" approach
(5) workers are valued as the key to achieve productivity
(6) excellent companies stick to their knitting, exploiting their core competencies and not pursuing wild goose chases
(7) they keep their form simple and their staff lean;
(8) they know how to be simultaneously tight-fitting and expansive.
Peters has always been in favour of delegation in a company. The manager can't know everything. If he tries he'll get snowed under in useless detail.
A Darwinian approach to the achievement of excellence had to be adopted to achieve excellence. It is better to do something wrong than do nothing: people should not be terrified of making mistakes. The next time they try they'll learn from it and do it right, or hopefully better. So excellence could be gained incrementally, through a series of small steps bonded by a central message.
He is not a captive to consistency. A lot of the excellent companies praised by him in Excellence have not stood the test of corporate time. Some have disappeared. In today's world of shifting industry boundaries the notion of telling a company to stick to its knitting seems akin to an order for corporate suicide. But Peters doesn't mind changing his tune.
He believes now that there are no excellent companies. He modified the message. It was no longer enough to be excellent: companies have to stand out from the crowd. Companies have to shrink, even deconstruct. They have to innovate. They must make the workplace more interesting.
Old structures are redundant. They were obstructing progress. In Liberation Management (1992) pronounced the death of middle management in with the sentence: "… middle managers as we have known them are cooked geese." The individual employee increasingly has to brand himself or herself. He prophesies an increasing number of women workers. He welcomes this, women are better than men at working in teams.
He believes that "90 per cent of white-collar Jobs will be totally reinvented/reconceived in the next decade" His interest in crafting the new corporate citizen led to the production of a series of books including The Brand You 50 (1999) and Project 50 (1999).
Peters is a consummate performer, injecting the same messiahnism into his public appearances as is found in his books. A lecture by Tom Peters is a performance, a spectacle even. He is never static. Someone (at an obvious loose end) once calculated that he walks seven miles on stage while giving a lecture. He gives about a hundred talks a year throughout the world. He jokes that that's why he called his first horse "Frequent Flyer".
Tom Peters and Robert Waterman were also instrumental in the development of the 7Ss method of isolating management strengths and weaknesses, developed with their former colleague at McKinsey, Richard Pascale.
Essential Reading:
(with Robert H. Waterman)
In Search of Excellence (1982)
A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference (1985)
Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution (1987)
Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties (1992)
The Brand You 50 (1999)
Jack Welch: Larger-than-life business leader
Jack Welch is the former CEO of General Electric.
Born in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of a bus conductor, he studied chemical engineering at the university of Massachusetts, gaining a PhD in the same subject from the university of Illinois. He joined General Electric's plastics division in 1960. He devoted the rest of his working life to the company.
His rise was meteoric. At age 33 he became one of the company's youngest general managers. He subsequently served as vice president and sector executive for the consumer products and services sector and finally he was vice chairman and executive officer. In December 1980, after a little over twenty years in the company, he was named GE's eighth CEO, the youngest in the company's history.
Welch had an immense impact on corporate America, setting standards of best practice for its senior executives. He always led by example. He had shown during his rise to greatness the potential of GE's plastics divisions. He also laid the foundations for the success of GE Capital. As CEO he took a number of innovative steps to promote the disparate elements of what had become an unmanageable conglomerate. He announced to the various sectors that unless they could become either the number 1 or the number 2 in their respective industries they would bespun off. He commented: 'My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.' His talent-nurturing sometimes took unusual forms. He also introduced the practice of establishing "anti-groups" within certain divisions whose role was to put forward the opposite to official policy in a deliberate attempt to encourage debate and discourage group-thinking.
He earned a reputation for being endlessly creative, never being hide-bound by convention when it came to solving a problem.
He introduced Six Sigma Quality Management at GE, after its usefulness had been shown in Motorola. St Augustine asked God to make him perfect "but not yet". He was an early advocate of Six Sigma, a means of achieving near-perfection in manufacturing by gradual, incremental steps, monitored by specially-trained experts called Black Belts and Master Black Belts.
Welch also became known for his desire to communicate. He is reputed to have written three to four thousand notes to members of his staff every year. GE's financial success came at the expense of extensive layoffs. During the process of streamlining the company, over 100,000 workers lost their job. His perceived ruthlessness earned him the moniker "Neutron Jack". He hated bureaucracy of any form, and always sought people who were dedicated to change. He was also an active teacher at the GE Leadership Centre in Crottonville.
After nearly two decades at the helm Jack Welch prepared for departure followed by a smooth succession. The person who was to take up his mantle was chosen from within the GE organisation, through a long and rigorous process. This resulted in the anointing of Jeffrey Immelt as the prospective CEO from April 2001 when Welch promised to "walk away and keep walking". Things didn't just go to script. GE had acquired the Honeywell Company in 1990, and Welch announced he wanted to stay in charge to oversee the integration of this prized plant into his garden. However, the takeover was scuttled when the European Commission raised objections that the resultant company would have a dominant and potentially distorting role in the aviation financing sector in Europe. Welch was thus denied a last charge towards the setting sun. Most observers felt this did not do him any harm. At GE he was a larger-than-life figure.
Since retiring Jack Welch has continued to consult a number of Fortune 500 firms. He also found the time to write his memoirs: Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001). Outside the US the book had the less macho subtitle of Jack: What I've Learned Leading a Great Company and Great People It went to number one in the best-sellers' chart in America. He has since added Winning: The Ultimate Business How-To Book (2005). This "…is a book for the people in business who sweat, get their nails dirty, hire, fire, make hard decisions, and pay the price when those decisions are wrong,"
Essential Reading:
(With John A. Byrne and Mike Barnicle)
Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001)
(with Suzy Welch)
Winning: The Ultimate Business How-To Book (2005)
Next week: How maverick Richard Branson (#9) & Greatness guru Jim Collins are influencing the global business thinking. This special series is presented by India's leading management portal MBAUniverse.com in tie-up with UK based Thinkers 50. Thinkers 50, produced by UK based management experts Des Dearlove & Stuart Crainer of Suntop Media, is a bi-annual guide to which thinkers and ideas are most influential in today's times. (www.thinkers50.com)
