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On his maiden visit to Oman, Tom Peters does what he is best known for: being provocative
Mayank Singh

Tom Peters hates the epithet management guru, but is honest enough to admit that the adage has stuck despite his loud protestations. He was in Muscat on 23 April, for a day long conference organised by Competence HR, called Re-imagine! a title eponymous with his latest book. Despite having come a long way since In Search of Excellence which he co-authored with his colleague at McKinsey & Co Bob Waterman in 1982. He says that while the tenor and verbiage might have changed in the last 24 years (see interview), the eight principles at the core of the seminal work hold true even today. These are well worth a relook – a bias for action, close to the customer, autonomy and entrepreneurship, productivity through people, hands on value driven, stick to the knitting, lean staff, simultaneous loose tight properties.

His arguments were peppered with interes-ting anecdotes, provocative thinking and razor sharp wit. Here are a few to savour: If you mate two dinosaurs you do not get a gazelle, science is about passion and not brains, cool stuff is cooler than stuff which is not cool and intelligence is a highly overrated attribute.

Responding to a question, Peters described himself as someone who has always advocated the three virtues of energy, creativity and entrepreneurship. Energy is synonymous with enthusiasm. “If the choice was between choosing someone who was experienced and unenthusiastic and someone who lights up a room with his mere presence, the choice is simple,” says Peters. The examples do not stop there. What accounts for Starbucks success? Well, if you were to believe Peters, it is simple – Starbucks is the only place in the US where people who serve you smile all the time.

The presentation was sprinkled with illustrations of glorious successes and abject failures. Right up the ladder is IBM Global Services. As an interesting coincidence Peters at McKinsey & Co had recommended that the beleaguered IBM hire Andy Grove of Intel, as he was a tech geek, and according to Peters, one of the last hopes for the behemoth. Today, Peters rues this as one of his biggest mistakes. The board hired Lou Gerstner, an erstwhile CEO of a consumer products company with a mandate to break up IBM and sell it. Gerstner not only ignored the advice but reinvented the company with IBM services in 1993. IBM services had a turnover of US$55bn in 2005. Taking a cue from IBM, UPS is gunning to be ‘the traffic manager of corporate America,’ and MasterCard is trying to encash on the service potential with MasterCard Advisors.

The conference threw up a few nuggets for Oman too, as Peters championed the cause of the small enterprise (and nations) in a borderless world. And if ‘small is beautiful and efficient’ needed proof there was the example of Wegmans, a relatively small grocery chain which has piped The Wal-Marts and Citicorps to become the best place to work in the US. If Wegmans can take on and better the biggest conglomerates of the world what is stopping corporate Oman? An idea which is definitely worth a thought.

Businesstoday: You have been coming to the Middle East for over ten years now. What are your thoughts on businesses in the region?

Peters: I cannot pretend to be an expert on the region but I think the region has enormous potential. How many us would have bet our money ten years ago that Emirates will place the biggest order for the largest plane (Airbus 380) ever made in the world? That’s indicative of a global or a hyper regional aspiration. Oman has a number of opportunities associated with the region per se, given the enormity of what Dubai is doing. Oman has opportunities vis-à-vis intellectual capital. It’s the smaller countries or smaller areas which have an advantage over the bigger ones. A small enterprise has a tremendous advantage over a large business if it produces something that adds tremendous value. With the price of oil being over US$70 per barrel there are opportunities in drilling, secondary and tertiary exploration. You will have to work hard to make a mess of this.

Businesstoday: Can family owned firms, which dominate the businesses in the region, survive in an age of growing competition or do they need to get out and let professionals run their businesses?

Peters: Point number one is that as the professional class grows in the region, there is a supply of professional managers which was not necessarily the case ten-15 years ago. Point number two is that family run businesses can be enormously successful. If you look at statistics, you find that such businesses have an opportunity to be either awful or superb. Family owned firms can go crazy over innovation on the one hand or resist change. It is a little more difficult in the Middle East, as a family run business in the US does not include such a huge family as the cousins, and second cousins are not likely to be a part of the action. But here the extended family has a lot more impact on the structure. So it is a mixed bag. I would find it difficult to navigate a board loaded with cousins and second cousins because the reality is that families are far more difficult to deal with than people on the Wall Streets of the world.

Businesstoday: What strikes you most about China and India? Do you think that this is going to be the Asian century?

Peters: Yes, China has done incredibly well without making any major errors. The Indians from the beginning and the Chinese lately, have vigorously begun moving up the value added chain. The Chinese are not going to be the world’s suppliers of shirts, pants and sweaters for very long. The good news for the Gulf is that they are rapidly becoming a large consumer country. I saw some statistics which said that the Chinese are the third largest consumers of luxury goods. There are a number of people who may argue that the Indian story will be as good as the Chinese story if not better. At this stage the value added services of Indians are much larger than the Chinese. Moreover, India has a more open society which tends to support entrepreneurship and creativity in an exceptionally important way and that could be a huge difference. Irrespective of who comes out on top, both of them should do exceptionally well and the impact on everyone in the world, including the Gulf, is going to be enormous.

Businesstoday: From In Search of Excellence to Re-imagine, are the fundamentals still the same or has Tom Peters become flippant as some would charge?

Peters: On the one hand it is the same message – people, customers, human side of things, emotions. We wrote about leadership when nobody was writing about leadership except in the military 20-odd years ago, so that has been another constant theme. The theme was so radical in 1984 when In Search of Excellence was written that it had to be painted with conservative overtones. And so there was far more mild language and a black cover on the book. Since then the pace of change has increased dramatically. None of us (my generation) would have imagined that the world would become a young person’s world so fast. It’s a much younger, energetic and vibrant world and people are ready to accept strange ideas.

Businesstoday: What is the next big wave?

Peters: Life sciences, life sciences, life sciences and then life sciences followed by life sciences. We may have wars but once you start manipulating the human structure, it is just literally unthinkable. In the US we have issues of abortion and choice and so on but these are trivial compared to what we will see in the next 20 years.