Management Guru Peters Strikes Again

Tom Peters’ latest management book, subtitled “Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties,” takes about 15 hours to read. That’s 54 trillion nanoseconds, not counting naps and food breaks.

Isn’t 834 pages an awful lot for a decade purported to measure time in billionths of a second?

“My strong suspicion is that one grazes and does not go from front to back,” Peters says. Besides, he adds cheerfully, “It’s what I wanted to say.”

Ten years after the extraordinary success of his first book, “In Search of Excellence,” written with Robert H. Waterman Jr., Peters admits he was at least partly wrong in that work, and has gone off in a new direction in another hot-selling business book, his fourth, this one called “Liberation Management.”

And what a book it is. Studded with exclamation points, parenthetical asides and buzzwords like marketization, “Liberation Management” is an exasperating work proving that if companies are better off disorganized, books surely are not.

“I’m loath to add more jargon,” Peters writes at one point. “But damn the torpedoes. How about ‘businessing?’ ”

On the other hand, “Liberation Management” is full of interesting case studies to which clever readers will skip. Moreover, the basic message is probably sound: things are changing so fast and business is so competitive that firms must demolish their bureaucracies, form smaller units and let workers take charge of their jobs. The future, as Peters inelegantly observes, belongs to those with the best “brainware.”

This isn’t exactly news, but given the apparently insatiable hunger of American managers for advice, the book is certain to make Peters a lot of money. It’s already a Book of the Month Club main selection, and the first printing was 225,000 copies. It will also serve to boost the business of what might be called Tom Peters Inc.

Based in Palo Alto, the Tom Peters Group employs 25 people and racks up revenue of $10 million a year selling seminars, speaking engagements, articles, videotapes and other Peters products. A two-hour lecture by Peters will run you $65,000. A custom video--”Tom’s undivided attention is yours,” the brochure says--costs $45,000. Some ready-made tapes go for $895. The monthly newsletter costs $197 a year.

Peters’ latest book is quite different from his first. “In Search of Excellence” was a sensible, orderly work of moderate length that explained what some big, established companies were doing right. It was also a critique of the cautious, insular, hyper-analytical bias of so many corporate managements.

To the author of “Liberation Management,” by contrast, the words big and established seem almost anathema. A former McKinsey & Co. consultant, Peters now takes McKinsey and other such professional service firms as a paradigm for the way he imagines the businesses of tomorrow will have to be organized.

“We got a lot wrong in ‘In Search of Excellence,’ ” Peters says. “But in the real world, it was the right advice for the time.”

In fact, the characteristics Peters and Waterman attributed to successful companies--”close to the customer,” “autonomy and entrepreneurship,” “a bias for action” and others--remain perfectly sound.

But noting that the ‘80s have played havoc with the Fortune 500, Peters now advocates small companies, or at least large firms that act small. At these companies, employees would function as independent teams that seize and dispatch projects at warp speed. Titles and job descriptions would be history. There would be a pecking order, sure, but people would be accountable mainly to one another. Headquarters staff should be tiny. Initiative, expertise and fast footwork would be valued over all.

“There is going to be an awful lot less top brass than there is today,” he says, noting that International Data Group, the Massachusetts-based computer research firm and publisher of computer magazines, “runs a $700-million business with just 20 people at corporate headquarters.”

At the age of 50, Peters carries forth this message with the same chest-thumping fervor that has always marked his appearances. Get him started and he speaks loudly and much, the words tumbling out in the accent of his native Annapolis--a Baltimore accent, spiced with profanity and gestures. He’s always made a big deal of intensity and passion, and in this way at least Peters practices what he preaches.

To Peters, Hollywood and Silicon Valley are good examples of the future of big companies. The movie studios, for instance, rely on networks of alliances to form ever-changing, project-oriented units to get each job done.

“Technology permits the absence of bureaucracy,” Peters says.

Perhaps in keeping with some of his ideas, Peters remains attached to California, even though he spends part of his time at a farmhouse in Vermont. He’s lived in California at least part time for the past 25 years, and he remains especially bullish on the state.

“The entrepreneurial energy that has marked California since World War II is unprecedented probably anywhere else in the world,” Peters says. Alluding to the plenitude of research institutions and cutting-edge industries here, he calls California “the No. 1 intellectual playground on the planet Earth.”

But a management book the size of “Anna Karenina”? By a futurist who wrote it in longhand? In an age when many people hardly read at all?

An avid reader himself, Peters told the San Jose Mercury News with characteristic iconoclasm that if he were running a big company, “I would never read any damn management book. I think Anne Tyler and Franz Kafka have more to teach us about management than Tom Peters.”

Hmm. Maybe this guy really is a guru.