The other day, I finally got around to cleaning out my "filing cabinet" (others might refer to it as a cardboard box, but I prefer to think of it as a filing cabinet) and came across an essay assignment I wrote in my final undergraduate year at university.
The lecturer was fantastic and the material interesting - Organisational Change & Design with Ian Colville. In retrospect, it was in fact, one of just three courses that were of any lasting value from my final undergraduate year, but that is something for another post.
The essay task was to write an imaginary obituary for the Economist on Tom Peters (management guru and co-author of In Search Of Excellence - and a good deal more since). The trick was that we had to be innovative. My innovation was to write the obituary as a first draft by the writer that had subsequently been edited (lots of redpen) by a feature editor with a quite different opinion of Peters.
This rediscovery resulted in two things; firstly I was reminded why I didn't go into journalism (so apologies for this blog once again!) and secondly I got interested in Tom Peters again.
If I am quite honest, I don't think he ever really matched In Search of Excellence with any of his consequent books (and if you are really interested in some of the underlying thinking, you are in fact better of going for the more substantial writings of Weick - see also my books list at Amazon), but he remains a fantastic speaker and has - unsurprisingly - become a prolific blogger.
His own blog, http://www.tompeters.com/, is average, but he has a whole range of interesting links to further resources and other bloggers, and it is this resource that I would recommend; he knows everyone it seems and I spent ages browsing blogs that he links to.
His presentations are almost certainly the nastiest, most unclear powerpoints I have ever seen, but if you can get beyond the colours and to a certain extent the hubris, there are some interesting points on the need to constantly challenge oneself and the organisation.
One of his most recent posting caught my eye - Peters participated in a podium discussion with Seth Godin (I have a posting on him planned already) sponsored by American Express. It can still be viewed online here. He has some good things to say about the world at large (politics, entrepreneurship, the internet), but I was particularly taken by the pair's discussion of blogs, according to Peters the single most important and transformational tool he has used in his own professional life in the last 15 years. That said, I must confess that I am not 100% convinced just yet. Indeed, Seth Godin's view of the blog seemed more plausible to me - it doesn't matter if people are not reading the blog, it is the act of putting your thoughts down in writing that provides the value.
I hope he is right, looking at my reader statistics ;-).
1 comment:
Regarding the significance of blogs: I would agree that it is the act of putting thoughts down that has the greatest value. A side effect is the possible value, albeit entertainment rather than intellectual in many cases (this blog being an exception ;-)), to others that cannot be reached by jotting down your thoughts on a napkin or the margin of a newspaper.
Post a Comment