In Search of Execution (And, Happy Thanksgiving)

Twenty-six years ago Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published In Search of Excellence, and to some extent the genre of writing for business managers hasn't been the same since.  If for no other reason, it's worth taking a moment to revisit Peters' thoughts on the current state of the art of management, as the FT recently did in its weekly "Lunch with the FT" feature. 

But first, if you haven't read "Search," you might yet give it thought:

"When people think about the great management blockbusters, this is the text they have in mind. Search made the business book news. It has sold more than 10m copies and is still the model to which many business authors – whether they realise it or not – aspire. It also launched Peters on the path to global, jet-setting guru-dom."

Peters himself, however, will have none of his elevation to "guru:"

Few, however, have criticised what he does for a living as ferociously as Peters himself. “I say to people, ‘You got a bad deal, paying money to see me,’” he tells me. “I have utterly nothing new to say. I am simply going to remind you of what you’ve known since the age of 22 and in the heat of battle you forgot. You’d have to be one of those television preachers to believe that you’re going to work with a group of 500 people and change their lives. First of all, most of them agree with you. You’re not going to pay £1,000 [a head] to go and see someone if you think the guy’s a jerk."

Self-effacing as he may be, Peters has some deeply contrarian opinions.  For starters, don't kid yourself that you have it harder than your predecessors or that 21st-Century life is markedly more complex than things were in the past:

Is management getting harder? “No,” he replies firmly – and in defiance of the conventional wisdom. But what about all that new technology, the end of deference, the increased pace of life, and the heightened expectations of employees? Doesn’t that all make management harder?

On the whole, Peters thinks not. We exaggerate the extent of change, he feels. It is the arrogance of modernity to believe that we face unique and unprecedented challenges.   [Putting it in perspective,] my mom died two years ago a month short of her 96th birthday, which means that she lived through the arrival of long-distance telephones, automobiles, airplanes, jet airplanes, a man on the Moon, the great Depression, world war one, world war two, the cold war, Vietnam, Iraq one, Iraq two, [so don't kid yourself].

I beg to differ.  I believe the complexities of the challenges facing law firms today actually are unprecedented.  Here's a very short bill of particulars:

• No longer are all your partners within one timezone, let alone one zipcode. 
• Clients are more sophisticated (read: more demanding). 
• The war for talent, both raw recruits and laterals, has never been more intense. 
• Technology, a major blessing but with a correlative curse, has pushed "work/life balance" to the breaking point for many individuals.
• Transparency of financial performance, and pressure for ever-escalating numbers, seems to reach new annual highs.
• And perhaps putting a nice exclamation point on our landscape, Gary Hamel, merely "the world's most influential business thinker" according to The Wall Street Journal, has pithily described the world today as "less benign" than ever.

But speaking of war, which we were a moment ago, Peters served two tours of duty in Vietnam as a combat engineer building bridges for the Marines, and in a revealing passage, he says that much of what he learned about management came from the diametrically opposed styles of his two commanding officers.

I’m not exaggerating but I really spent the next 40 years of my life writing about Dick Anderson. He was a guy who believed that young men aged 23 needed a chance to express themselves. He believed that [writing] reports was incidental but that building stuff for your customers, typically the Marine Corps, was what you were there for.

“On tour two I had a naval academy graduate who would rather have produced an excellent report about things we hadn’t built than a lousy report about things we had. One guy wanted you to do something, the other guy wanted you to write reports. It was the best management training that one could possibly have had. Do what Dick did and avoid what Dan did – there’s the book ... it’s a very short book!”

What strikes me as most revealing about this remark is that it has nothing to do with strategy, it has entirely to do with execution.  And this from a pair of McKinsey consultants (Waterman, his co-author, being the other).

Peters confirms which side of the strategy/execution chalkline  he's on:

[T]he book did not have an easy birth. Its breezy tone did not play well with earnest colleagues at The Firm, as its authors were to find out. “There’s no way to describe the viciousness with which Bob and I were attacked within McKinsey,” Peters says. “This was not the Holy Writ. It was the intellectual challenge to what McKinsey stood for at the time.

“To some extent what Waterman and I were looking at was the business of ‘execution’, and execution is fundamentally a management thing. We were saying, ‘If you can execute well, it doesn’t matter what the hell the strategy is. The doing is what counts.’ But this was when ‘strategy’ was at its apex. We were pushing back."

Peters subscribes with a vengeance to school of relentless execution, and also to the not-inconsequential  role of luck.  He ironically describes his own good fortune:  “I was born in 1942, in the US. I was protestant. I had relatively intelligent parents and I was white – that’s the first 99.9 per cent of it. Hard work may have done the rest."  And "Search" itself?  "A decent book with perfect timing."

In other words, try hard and then try some more.  Many many things may not be within your control—today seemingly more than ever, Peters' protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—but one thing is within your control:  How hard you work and how much you  get done. 

Having the energy, the imagination, and the sheer intellect to tackle today's escalating challenges—with, I should mention, impeccable integrity—is perhaps the single greatest thing we have to be thankful for today.