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The Tom Peters Weblog

Dispatches from the New World of Work

Don't think of our current economic crisis as a recession. Instead, think of it as a recalibration.

Everything is different now.

If you think of it as a recession, you may be tempted to "hunker down" and wait for the economy to cycle back.

If you think of it as a recalibration, you will be motivated to focus on what you have to do differently, since everything is different now.

The way your business generates results is different, now.
Your customers think differently, now.

Your customers care about different things, now.

Your customers act differently, now.

Your customers may actually be different people, now.

Customers aren't disposable anymore; more than ever, you have to create sustainable customer relationships.

Everything is different now.

I'm posting this on January 7, 2009. One thing I'm convinced of is that the world I am working in today is different from any world I have ever done business in. The world has been reset. We can no longer look at the "LY" column on reports to use last year as a benchmark for what will happen this year.

(Please join me on January 9th for my free 2009 Readiness Teleseminar. You can register here. I'll address six questions that you must answer, to thrive in '09. Please sign up, and if you can't make it live you'll receive an audio recor

Innovate or Die: The Innovation110A Menu of [Essential] Innovation TacticsPart Three: Tactic #43 through #72Yesterday

Celebration!

43. Celebrate! Innovative organizations are places where people enjoy their peers' work, good tries, good screw-ups, milestones reached, etc. Celebrating these events, large and small and very small, is a fullscale part of the "innovation culture."
44. Celebrate failures. This peculiar form of celebration deserves particular mention. "Fast failure" is innovation's bedrock. Hence the encouragement thereof, rather than the stigmatization, is of paramount importance. Hence, the hearty celebration of the quick try run amok is of strategic importance.

R&D, Ubiquity of.
"Staff Department" R&D Paramount.

45. R&D spending/Overall. This is a "boring" staple of innovation, but obviously of great importance. Aggressiveness is called for. In addition to the firm itself, having, say, a set of vendors, most or all of whom are top-quartile in R&D spending in their industry, is also of great importance.
46. R&D/Big Co, Small Co. Aggressive R&D is not just the provenance of the big company. In fact, it is more important to the 2-person Professional Services Firm than the lumbering giant—talk about "Innovate or die"!

47. R&D spending/Small projects. Make sure the R&D portfolio includes many one-off, short-term projects. (Quite often, these little fellas grow to become the biggest of the big.)

48. R&D/100% Staff Departments. Aggressive R&D is a

Innovate or Die: The Innovation110A Menu of [Essential] Innovation TacticsPart Two: Tactic #17 through #42January 6

We Are What We Eat.
(And Who We Hang Out With.)

17. Hang out/"We are what we eat" We are what we eat/We are who we co-habit with, and variants thereof are of infinite importance to the effective innovator. Managing "the hang-out factor" is of the utmost strategic importance—and usually an under-tended lever.
18. Hang out/Basic axiom. Hang out with weird—get more weird. Hang out with dull—get more dull.

19. Hang out/Customer portfolio. Consider one's customer portfolio. Perhaps a few giant customers account for 85% of one's revenues. One must listen to them, but the odds are that these giants are relatively conservative. Hence one must purposefully and urgently recruit oddball-"on the frontier" customers. Their revenue stream may be limited, but these folks force you to play with novel products and services to meet their peculiar needs. Hence careful construction of the total customer portfolio is an essential practice.

20. Hang out/Customers everywhere. Customers at various staff meetings, on various teams, etc.

21. Hang out/Our folks at customer sites. Imbedded staff at lead customer locations. The success watchword is "intermingle."

22. Hang out/Vendors/Outsourcing Partners Portfolio. Instead of a few "strategic suppliers," as important as they may be, one needs "far out" vendors and outsourcing partners whose innovations force you into an innovation mode. I.e., repeat #19 and #20 and #21 for vendors.

Good as It Gets!January 5

If there are two better quotes than this pair I came across yesterday, which capture the spirit and practice of innovation as I see it, I don't know what they are:

"America is probably the best culture in the world at failing. We're willing to navigate in a fog and keep moving forward. Our competitive advantage tends to be at the fuzzy front end of things when you're still finding your way. Once the way has been found, we're back at a disadvantage."—Geoff Moore, Mohr Davidow Ventures, on the importance of investing in innovation (New York Times, 0104.09)

"We normally shoot a few takes, even if the first one is terrific, because what I'm really hoping for is a 'mistake.' I think that most of the really great moments in my films were not planned. They were things that naturally occurred and we said, 'Wow, look at that—that's something we want to keep.' That's when you hit the truth button with the audience."—Robert Altman, on his Academy Award winning Gosford Park

Both emphasize the role of failure and the unplanned—the twin centerpieces of effective innovation.

2009: Week OneJanuary 5

I started jotting down a few summary thoughts about innovation this past Saturday. Next thing I knew I had a list of 110 items. I decided to break the list into four parts. One part will appear each day through Thursday of this first full week of the new year. On Thursday we will also offer a PDF of the entire list.

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