Narrating the Management Guru

In Search of Tom Peters

David Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134116584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

David Collins, a well respected scholar of management gurus proves a critical reappraisal of the very influential work of Tom Peters. This volume examines his key works and reviews his detractors, offering an analysis of his contributions to the field of management that goes beyond the simple chronological model that has previously been used. Colli

1 The early works of Tom Peters

Introduction

In the chapter that introduced this work we observed that Tom Peters has had a profound impact upon the world of business and on our daily lives more generally. Indeed we argued that Tom Peters has entered and altered the way we speak of managerial matters whether these be related to the management of large-scale business concerns, the management of schools (Peters and Austin, 1985) or to the management of the self (see Peters, 1999c; 2003; Peters and Barletta, 2005a; 2005b). In addition we suggested that in making such changes to the language of business Tom Peters has made space for new forms of action and for new modes of organizing.

Yet we also suggested that it would be a mistake to assume that everyone recognizes the part which Peters has played in shaping the language and practice of business. Some readers will know nothing of the life and works of Tom Peters. Others may have an intimate knowledge of his musings on management but may well doubt his contribution to this arena. However, I suspect that most readers will fall somewhere between these two poles. That is to say that my experience suggests that most people connected with business have heard of Tom Peters but are not really qualified to venture an opinion as to the nature and quality of his overall project because they have read little of his work and, consequently, have no detailed knowledge of the ideas and orientations that underpin his account of the business of management.

Recognizing that most readers will have only a very limited appreciation of the life and works of this key management commentator, this chapter, and the one which follows, will offer a review of Tom Peters’ main published works on management. To this end Chapter 1 will focus upon Peters’ texts of 1982 and 1985, whereas Chapter 2 will focus upon the six key texts produced by Peters since 1987.

At first glance this division of Peters’ work into two chapters – the first dealing with only two texts while the second wrestles with a further six – might appear unbalanced. Yet first impressions can deceive. In fact Chapters 1 and 2 have been structured to bring balance to this text when it is considered as a whole. Thus Chapters 1 and 2 have been crafted in a manner that allows us to produce an account of the works of Tom Peters which divides (more-or less) evenly into two chapters dealing with:

• jointly versus single-authored texts,
• early versus later ‘guru works’ (Crainer, 1997),
• the early texts that have excited academic commentary and analysis versus the later texts that have, in contrast, generated little in the way of academic commentary or review.

Taken together, however, Chapters 1 and 2 should be read as an attempt to:

• explore the key ideas and arguments underpinning this author’s works,
• facilitate the narrative review of Tom Peters’ work that will be undertaken in Chapters 3 and 4.

Let us begin our exploration of the ideas and arguments of Tom Peters with a few words from his biographers – Stuart Crainer and Robert Heller

Peters’ biographers

Prefacing his rather gushing tribute to the wit and wisdom of Tom Peters, Robert Heller (2000) describes this commentator as a ‘business mastermind’ (original emphasis) who has ‘transformed the world of business’. Indeed Heller suggests that Tom Peters stands at the top of an industry which he, in effect, created. Thus Heller notes:

Tom Peters built his reputation as the archetype of the evangelical guru on one book, In Search of Excellence. Published in 1982, this title has outsold all other management books by millions of copies.

(Heller, 2000: 5)

Stuart Crainer (1997) in his professional biography (see Introduction) of Peters offers a similar account of this man’s project and legacy. He observes that:

Tom Peters has spawned an industry – the management guru business – populated by an array of top academics, consultants, a sprinkling of former executives and a fair share of charlatans. Competition [in this industry] is fierce and the pace fast. The world’s managers demand a constant stream of books, seminars, conferences, and videos. And they want more. Ideas are packaged and repackaged. Names become brands and every grain of innovative thinking is exploited for all it is worth. The bitchiness of academia is combined with the ruthlessness of the world of management consultancy.

(1997: 7)

Recognizing, only too keenly, ‘the bitchiness of academia’ and the ruthless world of the management consultant, we will not seek to add (unnecessarily) to the vitriol that has so often been heaped on the work (and character) of Tom Peters. Instead we hope to provide a fair and balanced assessment of this individual’s contribution to the business of management. Yet in doing this we must work to separate Peters’ contributions to the publishing industry and to, what might be termed, ‘management theatre’ (The Economist 24/09/1994) from his contributions to management thought and practice.

Theatre of hate?

Tom Peters’ contribution to the business of publishing is clear and enduring. He has enjoyed mass-market sales for 25 years. He has, in effect, spawned and raised a market niche that now successfully straddles the industry segments of publishing devoted to ‘Business’ and ‘Self-help’ (Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 1997). His contribution to ‘management theatre’ is similarly clear and uncontested. In Heller’s terms Tom Peters is ‘the archetype of the evangelical [business] guru’ (2000: 5).

Yet when it comes time to weigh up Peters’ contribution to management thought and practice, the tone of the discourse changes. Many who readily concede that Peters is an evangelist and a performer of world renown, stubbornly insist that Peters’ self-belief and stage-craft serve only to mask the fact that his thinking is cloudy, that his analyses are limited, and that his contribution to managerial practice is limited and limiting.

The 3Cs

In an attempt to give due weight to these competing perspectives on the nature and worth of Tom Peters’ contribution to the business of management, this chapter offers an analysis of Peters’ works of 1982 (Peters and Waterman, 1982) and 1985 (Peters and Austin, 1985) that, in the best alliterative traditions of guru commentary, is concerned with 3Cs. Namely:

• Context
• Content
• Critique

We are concerned with context simply because it is impossible to understand the content of any work on the business of management in isolation. For example we will argue that In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982) can only be understood, in context, as a product of more general discussions that took place in Europe and the US throughout the 1970s concerning (a) America’s decline as a manufacturing power and (b) Japan’s concomitant rise as an economic powerhouse (see Kahn, 1970; Kahn and Pepper, 1978). By the same token our discussion of the content of Peter’s key books is shaped by a recognition that this author’s ideas and arguments need to be explained, not simply as products, but as products in (and of) space and time. Our analysis of Peters’ texts, therefore, appreciates that the content of Peters’ works needs to be recognized as the product of particular social and economic contexts which:

• made certain ideas ‘thinkable’,
• transformed particular forms of thought into candidates for management action and organizational policy.

The third of our 3Cs – critique – seeks to place these readings of ‘content in context’ within an appropriately critical framework. In adopting this critical tone we recognize that, for many practitioners, Peters is above reproach. Yet we recognize, too, that for some in academia Peters is beneath contempt. Thus in offering a critical review of Peters’ contribution to the business of management we will seek to strike a balance. While seeking to avoid the charge of academic bitchiness therefore, we will, nevertheless, work to provide a critical assessment of Peters’ contribution to management thought and practice.

An unnecessary endeavour?

Many readers will doubtless be familiar with the academic and journalistic criticisms which were heaped on In Search of Excellence in the 1980s and 1990s, and so may feel that this appraisal of Tom Peters is unnecessary and, indeed, ‘old hat’. In response to this charge, however, it is important that we consider the following observations.

First, while it is undoubtedly true that many readers will be conversant with In Search of Excellence and may be familiar with some of the criticisms made of this text, few readers are likely to be familiar with the content of Peters’ later works and may have little appreciation of either the context of their development or of the criticisms that might be attached to these texts. Recognizing this, Chapters 1 and 2 have been designed to provide readers with a comprehensive analytical review of the key works that, as I see it, constitute the way-points in Peters’ 25-year career as a management guru.

Our second observation concerning the reader’s supposed familiarity with the works of Tom Peters relates to the quality of the criticism that has been voiced in the face of Peters’ proposals and prognostications.

Peters’ friends?

Many of the criticisms made of Tom Peters’ works are accurate and well put. However, it would be a mistake to assume that all Peters’ critics are equally well informed. Some critics, as we shall see, plainly misread and/or misunderstand this author’s work, while others might, more accurately, be charged simply with failing to read this guru’s works.

For example, writing for The Times (5/12/1992) Carole Leonard offers a review of Liberation Management (Peters, 1992). She tells us that Liberation Management is the follow-up to Peters’ second text Thriving on Chaos, which was produced in 1989. The problem for Leonard’s review, however, is that Thriving on Chaos was Peters’ third text and was published in 1987!

In the inaugural edition of the journal Critical Perspectives on International Business, Joanne Roberts (2005) makes similar errors. Casting a critical eye over the works of Tom Peters, Roberts attacks the publishing interests which, as she sees it, shape and distort the market for management knowledge. In this account of the business of publishing she argues that publishers of business books have a taste for particular forms and formats of work (which she disparages). Furthermore she argues that these publishers, like their commissioning counterparts in the cinematic industry, seem to prefer the familiar to the original, and so prefer to produce sequels to previously successful ‘blockbusters’. Thus she observes that:

management gurus, assisted by their publishers, adopt certain well-formulated methods to ensure the successful sale of their book. Such methods include the production of sequels to successful books. For instance, Peters and Waterman’s (1983) In Search of Excellence was followed by The Passion for Excellence (Peters and Austin, 1994) and most recently by Re-imaging! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age (Peters, 2003).

(Roberts, 2005: 57–58)

Yet there are a few problems with this statement; problems which suggest that Roberts is, perhaps, not best qualified to lambast Tom Peters:

1. The 1994 text to which she refers is actually entitled A Passion for Excellence and was first published in 1985.
2. The 2003 text which Roberts lists is actually entitled Re-imagine! and not Re-imaging!
3. It is difficult to view Re-imagine! as a simple sequel to A Passion for Excellence. A sequel is commonly defined as a continuation of an earlier story. Now while it might be accurate to portray A Passion for Excellence as a sequel to In Search of Excellence and while there are certain thematic continuities that link Peters’ first to his later book (doubtless similar continuities also appear in the works of Roberts), it is difficult to view Re-imagine! as a sequel to A Passion for Excellence since this work (as we shall see in Chapter 3) is quite unlike the other texts listed by Roberts in terms of layout, tone and narrative.

Recognizing the limitations of Peters’ texts and the limitations of those commentaries that would seek to engage with the labours of Tom Peters, therefore, this chapter seeks to provide:

• a critical review of the works of this author and
• a critical review of the commentaries produced by Peters’ detractors.

In this endeavour, and for ease of exposition, we will offer a chronological analysis of Tom Peters’ main published texts on management.

Table 1.1 offers a list of Tom Peters’ main texts on management while Table 1.2 lists those texts which, for want of a better term, we will label as ‘minor works’. These minor works are excluded from our present analysis on the understanding that they tend to offer either condensed versions of ideas and arguments that have been developed in one or more of the main texts or ‘signature’ products developed by lesser members of the Tom Peters Group (TPG), which this guru has built up to service his personal brand (see also Golberg, Notkin and Dutcher, 1995).

Table 1.3 attempts to give some indication of Tom Peters’ appeal as an author as it cites US sales figures for his key texts. These sales figures were generously provided by the Tom Peters Group.

Given our concern with chronology, our analysis commences with an account of perhaps Peters’ most famous contribution – In Search of Excellence – which was published with a colleague in 1982.

In Search of Excellence

Context

In Search of Excellence was first published in 1982 as the collaborative product of Tom Peters and his McKinsey consulting colleague, Bob Waterman. Critical commentaries on this text tend to highlight the peculiarities of the socio-economic context that characterized America – and much of Western Europe – during the 1970s and early 1980s.

Table 1.1 A catalogue of Tom Peters’ ‘major’ or ‘key’ texts on management

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(1982) In Search of Excellence (joint with Robert Waterman)

(1985) A Passion for Excellence (joint with Nancy Austin)

(1987) Thriving on Chaos

(1992) Liberation Management

(1993) The Tom Peters Seminar: Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations

(1994) The Pursuit of Wow!

(1997) The Circle of Innovation: You can’t Shrink your Way to Greatness

(2003) Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age

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Table 1.2 A catalogue of Tom Peters’ ‘minor’ texts on management

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(1999a) The BrandYou 50

(1999b) The Project50

(1999c) The Professional Service Firm50

(2005a) Tom Peters Essentials: Design (joint with Marti Barletta)

(2005b) Tom Peters Essentials: Talent (joint with Marti Barletta)

(2005c) Tom Peters Essentials: Leadership (joint with Marti Barletta)

(2005d) Tom Peters Essentials: Trends (joint with Marti Barletta)

(Not dated) Project 04: Snapshots of Excellence in Unstable Times

(Not dated) Women Roar: The New Economy’s Hidden Imperatives

(Not dated) We Are in a Brawl with No Rules

(Not dated) The Death Knell for ‘Ordinary’: Pursuing Difference

(Not dated) Re-inventing Work: The Work Matters!

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Table 1.3 Sales figures for the main works of Tom Peters

It is, of course, important to highlight the ways in which the socio-economic context of America acted to shape the content of this text. Likewise it is important to acknowledge the ways in which particular readings of this context helped to facilitate the acceptance of the core message contained in this text. But this is only a part of the story. To gain a fuller appreciation of the nature of In Search of Excellence we need briefly to trace its genesis within McKinsey and Co, and to do this we need first to consider the nature of the management consulting industry.

The consulting industry

Commentaries on management consulting (see Clark and Fincham, 20...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The early works of Tom Peters
• 2 The later works of Tom Peters: The guru years
• 3 Crazy days call for crazy ways? Narrating Tom Peters
• 4 Stories and storytelling in the work of Tom Peters
• 5 Doubting Thomas
• Notes
• Bibliography