When management guru Tom Peters pronounces the word “excellence,” he’s thinking about the short term. His latest book, The Excellence Dividend: Meeting the Tech Tide with Work That Wows and Jobs That Last, which was published in April, contains a chapter titled, “Excellence Is the Next Five Minutes.” It features the following liturgy:
EXCELLENCE is your next conversation.
Or not.EXCELLENCE is your next meeting.
Or not.EXCELLENCE is shutting up and listening–really listening.
Or not.
Peters’s decades-long obsession with excellence in business dates back at least to 1982, with his best-selling In Search of Excellence, followed three years later by A Passion for Excellence. And of course, Peters is also well-known for his landmark Fast Company essay, “The Brand Called You,” from 1997, which casts excellence seeking as a solo affair, something that secures individuals’ portable strengths no matter where or how they happen to apply them. Today Peters hasn’t so much shifted that frame as tilted it to size up the looming specter of automation.
Yet in his latest book, Peters writes approvingly of Vernon Hill, founder of Commerce Bank and Metro Bank. “Very long hours have been one signature of the Commerce/Metro experience,” Peters points out. “[The] branches are open a previously unheard-of seven days a week (and until midnight on Fridays!).” I asked Peters, in a recent phone interview, whether he thinks a workforce like Hill’s, powered by this sort of excellence, can still deliver the same payoffs in 2018. Not only do those long hours sound like a recipe for employee burnout, but the convenience of always-open bank branches might no longer be the measure of excellent service in an age of mobile banking and peer-to-peer payment apps. Does excellence need redefining? Or a re-evaluation altogether?
Peters was characteristically intelligent and open-minded on this issue. “I think your point is well taken,” he reflected. “I really do think I could have gone a lot further in general, and specifically in this book, on that topic.”
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It matters because excellence costs employees time and energy, as Peters well knows. It also costs their organizations time and money. The trick, which Peters has devoted his professional life to, is to figure out how to sync up those costs and benefits so that the latter stack up higher than the former–the “dividend” of his book title. Fail to do that, and the pursuit of excellence may burn you out even before automation threatens your livelihood.
For organizations, then, it’s crucial to start thinking as hard about employee experience as about customer experience. Here are a few ways to do that, taking a page or two from Peters.