Sermon on the Valley: A Review of 'Re-imagine!' by Tom Peters

What strikes one at the first look at Re-imagine! is its looks. Tom Peters chose Dorling Kindersley, known for their atlases, as publisher for his book. 'Design: The 'Soul' of New Enterprise' is the title of Chapter 10. Design is very much at the core of the book too as Tom Peters makes a case for companies to redesign themselves.

Re-imagine! opens with the metaphor of New War, using 9/11. Just as 'a tiny band of fundamentalists humbled the world's only super power', big enterprises too are vulnerable at the hands of disruptive upstarts. Perpetuity is nonsense. Jim Collins (of Built to last) got it wrong. It is survival of the fittest, not the fattest. There is dire need for organizations to transform themselves.

Re-imagine! essentially addresses the American audience although there are many chapters that could interest non American readers too. Just as there has been 98.5% reduction in the blue-collar manpower requirement, white-collar jobs too are under trouble. According to Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, 75% of jobs in GE will disappear in 3 years. A bureaucrat is an expensive microchip. Embrace the model of the PSF (Professional Services Firm) such as McKinsey. Tom Peters laments that there are hardly any books on PSFs except a few including one by him.

The section titled 'new bus!ness new brand', easily the most interesting part of the book, deals with experience, dream business, design, beautiful systems and the heart of branding. Over the years, services have come to dominate the business. Tom Peters draws attention to how product companies like IBM, AT&T, Ericsson and GE Power Systems have progressed 'from Product Provider to Solutions Impresario' and aim at giving great experience to their customers. Quoting a friend, Tom Peters describes various levels in the value chain, viz.. 'The raw-materials economy', 'The goods economy', 'The service economy' and 'The experience economy'. The 'experience bit' adds the major chunk of the revenue. What Harley-Davidson sells is 'the ability for a 43-year-old accountant to dress in black leather, ride through small towns, and have people be afraid of him'. Lest it may sound undermining products, Tom Peters adds that the integrated solutions stuff 'makes sense if the original product (that is, the 'price of entry') ...is great. Not good, but great'. Also you can focus either on creating major revolutions in products or providing integrated solutions, not both.

What is the next level above experience? It is 'embracing the dream business'. Ferrari is a dream product while Hyundai is a common product. Marketing of dreams is called dreamketing by Longinotti-Buitoni, former Ferrari North America CEO. While it is exciting to read this chapter, one doesn't agree with Tom Peters here as it is rather over simplified. Just as one can infuse emotion into common products, one can also innovate by stripping the emotional appeal and offer a functional product. Anita Roddick's (whom even Tom Peters extols repeatedly) Body Shop is a cosmetics company that reduced the price by doing away with glamour and fancy packaging, emphasizing the use of natural ingredients and healthy living.

How can an individual (read American, although others too may need this in the near future) survive and succeed in the present times? By taking wow projects that make a difference. And rate each project on a scale of 10, where 10 is for aiming to change the world. What if one doesn't have the power or rank? Getting things done doesn't have anything to do with power or rank. What one needs are passion, imagination and persistence.

What about the boss? How can he change the status quo? Ordering systematic change is a waste of time. In stead the boss must wander around, discover heroes and show their work as demos to prove that such things are doable within the company. And tell stories to fire the heroes in the making. Also hang out with weird to think weird.

Re-imagine! worships Steve Jobs and companies like Netscape. Silicon Valley is the model. Change the world like Netscape and die fast. While Netscape did change the world, its death was premature. In stead of celebrating its end, one will expect to know from the book the strategy to avoid it (such as staying below Microsoft's radar). Companies like GE, IBM and Dell are also repeatedly mentioned but there is no in-depth analysis of their success.

Re-imagine! is a collage of exciting, weird, outrageous and subversive ideas. It excites and even shocks one by its audacity, which can help in forcing one to think in the process. The book makes a case for action as against strategy and planning. This could be to correct the excessive reliance on strategy and planning over the years but it can lead to another danger of acting without any business strategy which is crucial to achieve innovation. Tom Peters often sounds like a missionary. While the book is by and large inspiring, it may ward off some readers who will find it flashy and not offering solutions to business problems. Re-imagine! essentially addresses those who ride their Harley Davidsons, carry their iPods and swear by Steve jobs. It does not go beyond reaching those who are already converted, although its portrayal of the contemporary business world could be instructive to a larger audience.

Watching the battle through binoculars: A Review of 'The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management' by Tom DeMarco

The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management by Tom DeMarco published by Dorset House Publishing, New York, 308 pp

Webster Tompkins, the hero of the novel, walks out of a corporate management course conducted by Edgar Kalbfuss, a twenty-five year old, for an audience that had spent half their lives in managing projects. It is a weeklong course that has all sorts of topics such as GANNT charts, PERT charts, status reporting, progress tracking, project milestone reporting, quality program etc but nothing on people management in the agenda. Tompkins tells Kalbfuss that management is all about getting the right people. For many of us, who have been victims of Kalbfusses, The Deadline touches upon the most salient aspects of project management.

Lahksa Hoolihan, working for Morovian KVJ, the secret service agency of Morovia, has heard the exchange of words between Tompkins and Kalbfuss and she is out to get the right people. She meets the ‘downsized’ Tompkins in the HR session in his Telecommunications company in New Jersey. The description of the HR session for ReSOE (Released to Seek Opportunity Elsewhere) is easily one of the most witty pieces of the novel: ‘This five-week program, according to the posted notice, was to be more than 100 hours of inspirational training, skits, musical interludes, and celebration of ReSOE status. The still-employed Human Resources people who put on the various sessions seemed pretty convinced that ReSOE was a blessing in disguise. They made it clear that they would have dearly loved to be ReSOEs themselves. They really would. But no such luck. No sir, they would just have to soldier on, bearing the burdens of salary and benefits as best as they could. Up on the stage now, they were trying to put on a brave front.’

Kidnapped by Lahksa to head Morovia’s software factory that has been set up by Morovia’s NNL (Nation’s Noble Leader) with the goal of being world leader in shrink-wrapped software, Tompkins divides the 1500 senior software engineers in Morovia’s ‘Silikon Valejit’ into eighteen teams–three for each of the software products (on the lines of Notes, PageMill, Painter, Photoshop, QuarkXpress and Quicken). Tompkins has the luxury of performing a controlled experiment in management. He sets up the three teams for each product with various sizes and differing degrees of pressure. Each chapter of the novel closes with journal entries that he jots down based on his inferences.

Central to The Deadline is the idea that management has turned into cerebral science and there is a need to have a relook at it. For Belinda Binda in the novel, the manager has to trust her gut, lead from the heart, build soul into the team & organization and develop a nose for bullshit. The novel shows that when managers are aggressive, apply pressure and make direct threats, it only causes damage. Allair Belok, Minister of Interior & Deputy Tyrant and villain of the piece, is such a one. By associating heart with a female and lack of it with a male, the author drives home his point. Belok imposes an impossible deadline on the projects. And then he asks the Morovian Software Engineering Institute to audit the projects to see that they attain CMM level 3 by the end of the year. It is the toughest situation any project can face.

The episode concerning the audit team’s objection to one of the Quicken project teams not writing the requirements specification will sound familiar to many of us. As Quicken is a well-documented commercial product, the team could get all the documentation from that product. The audit group manager wouldn’t agree that the requirement spec is not needed and reiterates that the team has abandoned the Repeatable process. Interestingly the B and C teams which had much less man power than the A team are the ones which see the opportunity for not writing the requirements spec and take it. The A teams find the translating of requirements from one form to another not useful but it helps to keep all the overstaffed teams busy. The director of Morovian SEI bails out Tompkins and asks the teams to carry out just one improvement: Last Minute implementation. This ‘scheme involved deferring coding as long as possible, spending the middle forty per cent or more of the project doing an exaggeratedly detailed low-level design, one that would have perfect mappings to the eventual code. It was this time spent on design that was supposed to result in a much-reduced need for debugging.’ How far removed is real life from fiction!

The novel’s stance towards process improvement programs like CMM is critical. To be fair to Tom DeMarco he does say that good process and continually improving process are admirable as well as natural goals. What he points out is that formal process improvement programs cost time and money. A project can hope to gain enough from a single well-chosen method improvement (such as Last Minute implementation) to repay the time and money invested in the change. Multi-skill improvement programs, such as increasing an entire CMM level, are most likely to make projects finish later than they would have without the program. This is a highly debatable topic.

There are useful episodes on conflict resolution, project sociology, risk management, modeling & simulation of the development process, estimation using function points etc. Lahksa drops some powder in Belok’s drink to make him contract Herpes and then packs him off for a year to undergo treatment in a clinic in Atlanta. His absence helps Tompkins to work in peace. The B and C teams complete the projects successfully. As Belinda says, this is the way the ends of projects are supposed to be, but almost never are. Tompkins can pick up his binoculars and watch how it all turns out just like George C Scott does after passing the intelligence to his subordinates and quietly watching the battle in the movie Patton. NNL takes Morovia to the year’s hottest IPO. Tompkins makes a killing from his stock options but his plans for quite retirement are thwarted by Lahksa. In the end he finds her offer most welcome.

As a novel, The Deadline may have flaws: It deals with types and lacks in complexity. Project problems are solved rather too easily. But then the novel has been written to illustrate the author’s ideas on project management which will help one learn how to transfer the intelligence to the team, pick up one’s binoculars, quietly watch the action and intervene only if something goes awry just as in Patton.
-2001