Tom Peters has been so criticized and parodied in the past few years that we may well be at risk for an outbreak of a re-revisionist movement that will not only promote his complete works as a way to think about business but reveal it to be a secretly coded manuscript that, decrypted, details the conspiracy undertaken by the Odd Fellows Lodge, the City Council of Joplin, Missouri, the companies formed from the sham dissolution of the Standard Oil Trust, and the Tri-PMLA ((The cabalistic alliance of the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Pittsburgh Medical Library Association, and Premier Livestock Auctions Ltd.)) to eradicate the evidence that Bill Gates and Tom Cruise are, in fact, the same person (when was the last time you saw them together?).
Regardless, I have long admired this Tom Peters quotation,1 which elegantly articulates my own core theory of business:
I first studied about Hewlett-Packard in 1979. 1 know its story in great detail. It went from being a technical company to a legendary success, a model for other companies. Its success was due to its wonderfully decentralized organization that later went through seven years of centralization followed by a period led by a renegade executive who lived out in the boondocks, and then another era headed by a former chairman who held onto a billion dollars’ worth of stock, kept his ear to the ground and parachuted back in to the company at exactly the right moment.
Not a fucking thing, except it’s really great to be lucky.
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- The quotation is from “Peters Provocations” by Kevin Kelly in Wired News.↩
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