Tom Peters: This is not a recession

“Don’t think of our current economic crisis as a recession. Instead, think of it as a recalibration. Everything is different now. If you think of it as a recession, you may be tempted to “hunker down” and wait for the economy to cycle back.”

“One thing I’m convinced of is that the world I am working in today is different from any world I have ever done business in. The world has been reset. We can no longer look at the “LY” column on reports to use last year as a benchmark for what will happen this year.”

You = Your iTunes

Tom Peters says his #1 belief about management is: You = Your Calendar.

“All we have is our time. The way we distribute it is our ‘strategic plan,’ our ‘vision,’ our ‘values.’ Period. So how’d you spend your precious time today? Tell me, and I’ll tell you what you actually care about — it’s simple and unerring.”

Maybe. But I don’t want to be my calendar. Nobody has to guess what bloggers care about. It’s all right here. But if I weren’t a blogger, you could look at my iPod and get a sense of who I am. In fact, here’s what you can do in lieu of a memorial service for smays: Plug my nano into a good sound system…put it on shuffle… and let it play until the battery runs down. Friends can stop by for a few minutes and listen.

Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age

From Tom Peters’ wonderful book, Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age:

* Getting things done ultimately is not about “power” or “rank.” It’s about…PASSION and IMAGINATION and PERSISTENCE.

* The biggest waste of time in the world: trying to sell and idea “up the chain of command.”

* A Cool Idea is by definition a…Direct Frontal Attack…on the Holy Authority of Today’s Bosses.

* The power of the “powerless” lies in “Boss-Free Implementation.”

* You don’t need an Officially Big Project to attack a Very Big Opportunity.

* Volunteer for Crappy Jobs: crappy jobs that let you take independent charge of things quickly—and early in your tenure.

Everybody on the Web is famous to 15 people

In an interview on Tom Peters’ website, David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web and coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto, offers the following on Weblogs:

“If you browse randomly through these 500,000 to a million Weblogs, most of them that you come across will be uninteresting to you. But, so what? It’s not that everybody on the Web is famous for 15 minutes. It’s that everybody on the Web is famous to 15 people.”