The Peters principles - interview with Tom Peters - Interview

Reason, Oct, 1997 by Virginia I. Postrel

Reason: Although an economy in which the idea of starting your own company is celebrated will produce both Laundromats and Silicon Valley.

Peters: You're absolutely, unequivocally, 100 percent with no rounding error right. That is completely true culturally, but they don't create the goddamn jobs. The real key to me is whatever the hell it takes to have more venture capitalists than anybody else, who pour the money into the businesses that have made it past the first two years that actually have some serious promise, because that's where the goddamn jobs come from.

Reason: Let me bounce some quotes off you. The first is from Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern. He writes about resistance to technological change: "The history of technological progress is the history of an endangered and much resisted species." He goes through several reasons for this. But one of them is, he says: "For the producers themselves life in a technologically creative world may be quite different from life in a static economy. It is one thing to resist a once-and-for-all change in technology, quite another to resist living in a hectic and nerve-racking world in which producers have to run to stay in place and constantly spend effort and resources on searching for improvements."

His argument is that eventually even the technologically creative people out of exhaustion go to government to slow things down.

Peters: I think it's true. You turn out to be the needle in the haystack who hits the grand slam home run with the 3Com or Apple or the Hewlett-Packard. You work your ass off for 25 years. Your bank account is either $5 million or $105 million or more than that. And then you become a conservative. Age makes you a conservative. The fact that you deserve it for all that hard work makes you a conservative.

My half-baked reading of history is that we continue to go through these waves of entrepreneurial explosion followed by merger mania and consolidation. Out of that come big sluggish companies that eventually collapse under the weight of what they've created, and are killed off by the next wave of entrepreneurs.

I remember so clearly Jack Welch's predecessor at G.E. - Reg Jones - was featured as much in Fortune as Welch is, for exactly the opposite reasons. Because Jones created a model of Galbraithean management in the 1970s that said: The chairman of a Fortune 100 company's place is not in the home or the office; it is in Washington. And it was the model that I grew up with when I was going through Stanford - of business executive as industrial statesman. The wonderful news is that the Japanese, among others, took us out of our misery. And we ended up with a new generation of leaders.

Reason: There's a great nostalgia now in political circles for the 1950s.

Peters: I have a term that I use in my seminars. I call it the "false-nostalgia-for-shitty-jobs phenomenon": Oh for the halcyon days when I could sit on the 37th floor of the General Motors Tower passing memorandums from the left side of the desk to the right side of the desk for 43 years. It's just total shit. It really is. Life was not as glorious as imagined.