Tom Peters and Management

A History of Organizational Storytelling

David Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032037769
• eBook ISBN: 9781000529081
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Tom Peters is the management guru's management guru. His is the story that launched a thousand management stories. This new book offers a critical assessment of Tom Peters' contribution to management thought and practice.

The author, a globally recognized expert on management gurus, places Tom Peters at the forefront of the narrative turn in management. Charting and accounting for Tom Peters' contributions to management, the book analyses the practices that Peters has used to shape our appreciation of the business of excellence and in so doing probes and accounts for the preferences of the excellence project.

An accessible and illuminating work, the book will appeal to students and scholars as well as thoughtful managers and leaders.

1The genesis of the excellence project

DOI: 10.4324/9781003188940-2

Introduction

This chapter will offer an account of the genesis of the excellence project. In our next chapter we will offer an analysis of In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982) and of A Passion for Excellence (Peters and Austin, 1985). Chapter 2 will therefore build on the analysis developed here and will consider the constitution of the eight organizational attributes said to be necessary to secure the business processes required to change organizations and, indeed, to revitalize the US economy. In addition Chapter 2 will offer reflections on the manner in which the excellence project has developed since the mid-1980s. In this chapter however we will move ‘upstream’ (Latour, 1987) to offer an account of the genesis of the excellence project. Surveying this admittedly protracted moment of creation¹ we will focus on the development of the ‘McKinsey 7-S framework’, which, as we shall see, constitutes the very foundations of the excellence project.

* * * * *Textbook accounts of business excellence, developed for students of management tend to be built on, what Latour (1987) would call, a ready-made account of scientific endeavour. Latour employs this culinary metaphor, as we have seen, to suggest that the textbooks, which we use to induct our students in the business of management, are based on a pedagogy that accounts for ideas from a vantage point that, in being informed by hindsight, is blissfully free from controversy. Noting the manner in which this pedagogy acts to obscure or to elide the very real and active controversies that shape human endeavour, Latour invites us to consider ideas as they are constructed. Thus, Latour insists that our pedagogy should explore and account for concepts at the point in time at which they remain contested and indeed contestable. Accepting the essential truthfulness of Latour’s analysis, this chapter will offer an account of the genesis of the excellence project, which considers the human contests and controversies that shaped its formulation and development. To this end we will consider the network of associations that, in effect, built the McKinsey 7-S framework.

* * * * *The McKinsey 7-S framework is routinely taught to students and is offered, more generally, as a heuristic, which usefully captures the socio-technical totality of the organized world. The framework is, of course, now known globally and has been summarized in countless textbooks and student essays. Yet the ‘ready-made’ science offered by these textbooks simply invites students (a) to recount the fact of the framework’s existence while (b) considering its implications for structure and conduct within business organizations. This ‘cold’ account of the birth of the excellence project however simply fails to acknowledge that ‘7-S’ model, emerged as a collaborative endeavour and as an expedient response to a competitive crisis that had developed within McKinsey and Co. This chapter will explore the development and emergence of this framework within this context. I will show that while the McKinsey 7-S framework is, now, very closely associated with Peters and Waterman, the framework actually developed as a collaborative arrangement between a number of key individuals and was, in fact, first showcased not by Peters, but by his contemporaries, Pascale and Athos [1981] (1986) in The Art of Japanese Management.

Compared to the commercial success enjoyed by In Search of Excellence, the work of Pascale and Athos is generally taken to be, frankly, something of a failure (see Collins, 2018, 2021a). Noting core similarities between The Art of Japanese Management and In Search of Excellence, Crainer (1997: 41) observes that the differing fortunes of these texts resolves to the question of tone. He suggests that Peters and Waterman (1982) offer an endorsement of American values and business practices (mom and apple pie) whereas Pascale and Athos ([1981] 1986) offered only ‘humble pie’.

There is, as we shall see, much to recommend Crainer’s summary position. Yet as we approach the 40th anniversary of the publication of In Search of Excellence, there is an opportunity to pause and to reflect more fully on these consanguine texts. Indeed, as we observe the 40th anniversary of the excellence project we have an opportunity to reflect on what might have happened had the public chosen Pascale and Athos (over Peters and Waterman) as their gurus of business excellence!

Counter-factual history is, of course, a potentially fraught and contested endeavour. Indeed, some historians would suggest that counter-factual history is little more than a parlour game that tends to indulge idle and, often, ill-informed speculation (see Ferguson, 1997). This may well be an accurate summary of much counter-factual history. Nonetheless, it will be useful for our purposes to highlight the ways in which In Search of Excellence and The Art of Japanese Management offered contrasting accounts of the essence of management. Building on this reflection I will suggest that in pursuing the search of excellence over the art of (Japanese) management American business chose an easy path and over the long term, the wrong route out of the crisis. Indeed, I will argue that a change project launched from the foundations established by Pascale and Athos would have enabled a qualitatively different appreciation of ‘management’ and, might have prompted a strategic reformulation founded on a genuinely social policy of enterprise, informed by and sensitive to ideas of plurality.

Accordingly, our chapter is structured as follows: We begin with an account of the development of the 7-S framework. Tracing the networked associations that enabled and enacted this formulation we will reveal the many hands that formed this now familiar heuristic. While noting that the ‘happy atom’ has become known (and applied) worldwide as a tool, which captures and expresses the social-technical totality of the organizational world, I will highlight Atkinson’s (1997) attempt to extend this framework. Atkinson’s suggested extension is, I will argue, frankly, unnecessary and unhelpful. Yet I will argue that this flawed modification is, nonetheless, useful for our purposes because it serves to demonstrate both the core wisdom of the 7-S framework and the extent to which this device has become foundational (a) to the teaching of management and (b) an important constituent of its routine practice.

The work of Pascale and Athos [1981] (1986) builds and depends on the heuristic that Atkinson would have us develop and extend. And yet, the work of Pascale and Athos has often been ignored by the public or, worse, has been derided by the managerial elite that was active in business and hence prominent in the United States during the 1970s. While accounting for the contrasting fortunes of these texts I will suggest that The Art of Japanese Management like its cousin In Search of Excellence was (and remains) an important work on management. Yet I will argue that The Art of Japanese Management has a significance beyond that accorded to In Search of Excellence. Thus, I will argue that the work of Pascale and Athos offers a qualitatively different account of business in its social context that, in application just might have enabled an approach to management that was truly deserving of the ‘hands-on, values driven’ endorsement that Peters and Waterman (1982) suggest is a key component of business excellence.

The constitution of the McKinsey 7-S framework

Tom Peters dates the birth of the excellent project quite precisely. The problem being that he does this twice and each time suggests a different point on the calendar.

In 1982 (Peters and Waterman, 1982: 12) Peters suggested that July 4, 1979 represents the birth date of his research on excellence. It was, he tells us, on this date that a successful presentation to Royal Dutch Shell offered feedback that was sufficient to convince those who had been developing reflections on ‘organizational effectiveness’ to continue with their work. More recently however Peters (2018: 30) has offered an alternative birth date, which suggests that the excellence project is just a little older than previously acknowledged, this date being ‘Good Friday 1978’.

Elaborating on this moment in time Peters tells us,

It was Easter week 1978. The main computer in the San Francisco office of McKinsey & Co., where I worked as a consultant, chose to crash thirty-six hours before our managing director was scheduled to give a report on an important project to the top team at Dart Industries in Los Angeles.

With the computer down, his team was unable to prepare the sort of presentation he wished to make. I, meanwhile, was working frantically and independently on a project commissioned by the powers that be in the firm’s New York headquarters. Though I was psyched by the project, it had the uninspiring title of “Improving Organizational Effectiveness.” John Larson (the S. F. McKinsey boss) came to me in desperation (Dart was a core client) and said, in effect, “Can you put something short but somewhat sweet together and fob it off on Dart and save my ass?”

“Sure,” I said in a flash; one dreams of saving one’s boss’s ass, right? … I got home about 10:30 pm and, in a daze, dutifully went to my home office and started pulling material together for Dart. I honestly have no idea what next transpired, but I do know, Bic pen in hand … I crafted a draft cover page with but one word, in all capital letters: EXCELLENCE.

28 (original emphasis, capitalization, parentheses and ellipses)

Later we will return to the moment of clarity that saw Peters render, in all capital letters, ‘excellence’ on the draft cover of his rushed presentation. For the moment however we must continue to trace the now contested timeline and the network of associations that led to the development and public articulation of the 7-S framework.

The account of the genesis of the excellence project that is offered by Pascale and Athos [1981] (1986: ix) confirms much of the narrative offered, above, by Peters. It acknowledges, for example, that Peters was truly instrumental to the development of the 7-S framework: ‘Peters pointed out in a working paper on “excellent companies” that firms so designated explicitly managed a wider range of variables than other companies’.

Yet in offering this endorsement, Pascale and Athos also remind us that Peters’ working paper was actually developed to support a programme of applied research that McKinsey instituted around 1978. Pascale and Athos do concede however that Tom Peters, partnered by his McKinsey colleague Jim Bennett had been active in this corporate research project from the outset.

Commenting on the aims and scope of the research project instituted by McKinsey, Pascale and Athos ([1981] 1986: viii–ix) note that together Peters and Bennett,

set out to review the entire literature and current thought about effectiveness. They concluded that the emphasis upon strategy and structure had gone beyond the point of diminishing returns, and that other factors were also critically important and deserved more attention.

Following the publication of Peters’ working paper on ‘excellence’, Bob Waterman was drafted to the project by more senior operators within McKinsey, Pascale and Athos ([1981] 1986: ix) observe that Waterman accepted the core concerns articulated by Peters but feared that these would be ‘very difficult to convey persuasively to a wider audience of consultants and executives steeped in the strategy-structure emphasis.’ Mindful of this issue, Waterman, we are told, invited Athos (who had combined consultancy, research and graduate school teaching) to join the research project as a consultant. Soon afterwards, it seems, Waterman tendered a similar invitation to Pascale, whose cross-comparative work, we are told, made him amenable to what we might term Peters’ ‘additional variables hypothesis’. Accounting for this enlargement of the team, Pascale and Athos, tell us that Bob Waterman anticipated that their involvement would add conceptual sophistication and communicability to the outline prospectus that Peters and Bennett had begun to craft.

In June 1978, just as Waterman had hoped, Athos made a suggestion to this small collective that we might now view as highly significant. Athos suggested the need for a conceptual schema designed to organize the core variables identified by Peters and Bennett ‘so that their interrelationships might be emphasized, and so that “fit” among the variables might be better understood’ (Pascale and Athos [1981] 1986: ix). Arguing that an alliterative approach would improve memorability, and thus, learning and acceptance within a population that had been schooled in a fundamentally different (and ‘hard’) way of thinking, Athos (a) proposed a 5-S framework and (b) persuaded Peters and Waterman to embrace this schema.

Substituting what had previously been labelled ‘guiding concepts’ for ‘superordinate goals’, the collective agreed, initially, on three ‘hard s’ factors (strategy, structure and s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1 The genesis of the excellence project
• 2 The works of Tom Peters, 1982–1985
• 3 The works of Tom Peters, 1987–2018
• 4 An introduction to organizational storytelling
• 5 Types of organizational stories
• 6 Excellence and the management storyteller
• 7 Hierarchy and anxiety in management stories
• 8 Women in management stories
• 9 Concluding comments
• Bibliography
• Index