Tom Peters is my favorite business author. His combination of practical case studies, in-depth research, deep thinking and snappy prose makes it a pleasure to dig through such weighty topics as change management and global competition. His first book, In Search Of Excellence, is still regarded as one of the seminal business volumes.
I’m currently reading Thriving On Chaos, which I picked up because it seemed like a great title for this day and age. Peters proved he had his finger on the pulse of the time when he wrote, “The world has not just ‘turned upside down’. It is turning every which way at an accelerating pace. To meet the demands of the fast-changing competitive scene, we must simply learn to love change as much as we have hated it in the past…Today, loving change tumult, even chaos, is a prerequisite for survival, let alone success.”
That passage is both startling and sage—even more so when you realize that Peters wrote those words in 1987. This year is the 35th anniversary of the initial publication of Thriving On Chaos, and if we look at our current world and realize Peters’ message then went largely unheeded, its basic point still can be applied to our modern issues.
In 1987, the issues were offshoring of labor, worker unrest, wage challenges and global competition. At that time, Japan was the manufacturing superpower that was challenging America’s dominance. Peters argued then that an unwillingness to embrace technological and organizational change was slowing our innovation and putting us behind other nations in the race to meet the constantly evolving needs of the customer.
The players have changed, but the challenges are the same—utilizing workers to their highest advantage and compensating them appropriately for the value of that skill; embracing technology to provide speed and precision on the plant floor; and developing a flexible, adaptive and interactive system across sales, manufacturing, procurement and distribution that shortens the time between the desire for a product and its arrival at our front door.
Machine Design’s content partner Industry Week reviewed the book at the time and wrote, “From yesterday’s viewpoint, it may look like chaos. From tomorrow’s, it may be the only route to survival.” But the other important lesson to take from Peters’ 35-year-old tome is that in between its relevance then and its relevance today have been more than three decades of growth and economic expansion. Much of Peters’ wisdom was embraced for a time, and then seemed to have been relegated to the bargain shelves—which is where I happened to find the book,
And yet, as chaotic as the world looked then and now, we have always found the way to improve our operations. We have yet to fully optimize what we do because optimization always is a destination. Still, we have seen vast improvements in safety and productivity while innovating with digital technologies largely unimagined at the time Peters wrote his book. But the basic principles remain: There are crises and challenges, and there are innovations and ideas developed to meet those moments of chaos.
The advantage of six-plus decades roaming this planet is that I feel like we’ve been through times every bit as tough as we face today, and we have always—always!—persevered. The specifics of this moment are different; the challenge remains. We can do better. We can’t shrink from the challenges of this day. We can embrace the chaos because we have the confidence that as we have in the past, we will innovate and ultimately cooperate to find the answer.