The Peters principles - interview with Tom Peters - Interview

Reason, Oct, 1997 by Virginia I. Postrel

Reason: A lot of critics of current economic dynamism say what they're against is the pursuit of economic efficiency at the sacrifice of other values. My sense of it, particularly in your work, is that this is not primarily about efficiency. Efficiency comes along, but you have cultural goals. What you're doing is fostering creativity, openness, learning, diversity, playfulness....

Peters: Life is play. When Hayek says the economy is a discovery process, that means the economy is play. It means [Oracle CEO] Larry Ellison trying to stick his pecker out farther than Bill Gates's - excuse the crude analogy.

Silicon Valley's a playground. That's the beauty of it. It's the most serious part of the economy, and it is silly. It is purely silly. I mean, we have these guys with thick glasses like [current Hewlett-Packard CEO] Lew Platt, but the beauty of the Valley is total maniacs like [Advanced Micro Devices founder Jerry] Sanders and [Cypress Semiconductor CEO] T.J. Rodgers and Ellison....

Reason: T. J. Rodgers will be so upset that you compared him to Jerry Sanders.

Peters: I know, but it's fair, totally fair. My builder in Woodside tells me T. J. Rodgers has special drawers built into his closet to organize all his socks.

Reason: Yes. I've seen his closet. He gives tours when people come to his house.

Peters: He's proud of it! They are both so frigging weird that they don't even know how weird they are. To me it's a compliment to put him in that Sanders league. It's the freaks of Silicon Valley, and he's a freak. And freak to me is a good word, not a bad word.

Don't you think that a place like the Valley or Hollywood is home to a shocking degree of immaturity?

Reason: Places like that depend on having both a great deal of individuality and a kind of discipline.

Peters: Play has discipline. You watch a kid playing doing something in sand at the beach, and that is discipline with a capital D.

Reason: It has discipline, but it has discipline that's related to the task itself and not to some external ideal of discipline. One of the real problems, I think, is that a lot of intellectuals have learned everything they know about capitalism from Max Weber and his descendants, so all they know is the bourgeois work ethic. They don't appreciate the element of play that drives the discovery process.

Peters: Only Hayek and [historian Fernand] Braudel get it. With all my love for Hayek, I would give Braudel even more credit. Braudel let himself go and described everyday life and the transactions associated therewith.

Reason: I sent you the Weekly Standard article, "Cosmic Capitalists," by David Brooks. He compares efforts to reinvent business along less hierarchical lines to the French Revolution, a sort of hubristic overturning of all that has gone before: "It used to be that this modernist ethos, this desire to be free of history, to leap out into a brave new future flourished only in politics, where it created the disastrous Marxist utopias" and Various forms Of the arts. "And, now it's the cosmic capitalists." He's talking about you.