
August 18, 2019
Tom Peters on Excellence, Soft Skills, and Leadership – DisrupTV
Key Takeaways
- The definition of excellence – someone who continues to educate themselves and prepares for a changing future
- Project Oxygen was a study that looked at years of data to conclude what makes a manager great at Google
- Having STEM expertise ranked as the 8th most important thing
- The top 6 skills were all soft skills: Being a good coach, communicating well, listening well, possessing insight into other points of view, having empathy, and being supporting towards others
- There are 220 workdays a year – that means there are 220 lunch opportunities to network or build relationships with other employees
- “Don’t hire the jerks”
- One rotten apple can destroy the whole culture of a team or even a company
- “When you’re 68, the only thing you will remember is the people that you helped grow”
- “There’s never been a tombstone with net worth on it”
Intro
- Tom Peters (@Tom_Peters) is an American writer who’s written 18 books on business and management practices, and is best known for In Search of Excellence
Books Mentioned
- In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies by Tom Peters
- The Excellence Dividend: Meeting the Tech Tide with Work That Wows and Jobs That Last by Tom Peters
- Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang
Tom’s Book: The Excellence Dividend
- “Excellence is always a good starting point”
- If a 7-person team can be excellent, why can’t a 2,000 person finance department also be excellent?
- Big corporations do two things: Maximize efficiency and destroy jobs
- Tom loves entrepreneurs because they actually create jobs and hire people
- Tom recalls meeting a refrigerator maintenance man who ran a 6-person team who spent his own money to go to a workshop about the internet of things and connected devices
- This is excellence – someone who continues to educate themselves and prepares for a changing future
Google Research Studies
- Project Oxygen was a study that looked at years of data to conclude what makes a manager great at Google
- Having STEM expertise ranked as the 8th most important thing
- The top 6 skills were all soft skills
- Being a good coach, communicating well, listening well, possessing insight into other points of view, having empathy, and being supporting towards others
- Tom adds – Hard skills are soft, and soft skills are hard
- Another Google study showed that B-player teams significantly outperform A-player teams when it comes to the creativity of products
- One contributing factor to this is that B-players spend more time talking and listening to one another
Women
- “Women buy 80% of consumer goods”
- Women also make 50% of all professional purchases
- A woman can be putting together a $10 million RFP (request for purchase) one minute and making vacation plans for her family the next
- Women also make 50% of all professional purchases
- Women often make better managers because they are better listeners
- The world needs more female coders to counteract the bro-culture in Silicon Valley
Additional Notes
- There are 220 workdays a year – that means there are 220 lunch opportunities to network or build relationships with other employees
- By building a personal relationship with someone, your professional relationship will also strengthen and both bonds will grow
- “Don’t hire the jerks”
- One rotten apple can destroy the whole culture of a team or even a company
- If you give a talk with 2,000 people, don’t expect everyone to be wowed. If even a handful of people come up to you after the talk to thank you for your insights, that’s a win.
- Even after hundreds of talks, Tom still gets nervous before each one
- One study found that a teacher’s teaching style wasn’t as important as their passion for the subject
- Lesson: You have to be deeply passionate about your message if you want others to absorb it
- One of the most important things you can do as a leader is to have your employees give a shit about your company
- “When you’re 68, the only thing you will remember is the people that you helped grow”
- There’s never been a tombstone with net worth on it”
- Things that matter: Who you helped and who you supported
- There’s never been a tombstone with net worth on it”
- Management gurus need to help more SMEs (small-medium enterprises) because these are the companies that create jobs, not Fortune 500 companies