Excellence Required with Tom Peters

I hope that you like my first LinkedIn newsletter called "Think Forward: Trends. Inspiration. Bold Ideas." My goal is to share lessons learned from my What's Next Podcast as well as my LinkedIn Live interviews. Every week, I'll share some of the highlights from my guests to help you think differently about growth, innovation and leadership.

To make sure you don't miss an issue, if you haven't subscribed yet, just click the "Subscribe" button in the upper right corner above.

I hope this article below will inspire you to Think Forward!

------------------------

This week’s newsletter features the always awesome and candid advice from my friend and top leader in the management industry Tom Peters.  

Tom has written 18 books and has 35 years in the management industry. He continues to focus on putting people first, and indirectly inspires and helps people around the world by offering his content - all of it - for free - on his website.  

While this was my second interview with Tom for my What’s Next Podcast, this one was on LinkedIn Live and covered a range of topics including state of the union, diversity in leadership and his “Excellence Now Campaign: 2020-2022."

Here are a few of my favorite parts of our time together. 

How can leaders step back and give equal time to coaching, hiring, mentoring, building effective teams?

Inspired by Dov Frohman’s book Leadership the Hard Way, Tom suggests daydreaming. For any leader, 50 percent of your time should be on schedule, but you must daydream. Dov said about 100% of my ideas have come from daydreaming. You don’t have to respond to all emails within 37 seconds. Slow down. Take deep breaths. Think a little bit. Get up; walk outside on a sunny day or a snowy day, as the case may be. Stop teaching people that you respond to emails instantly. I mean it's on my top 10 list. Frenzy does not lead to excellence which, as you know, is a word I love. The day that frenzy takes over is the day that excellence dies. 

What do you think is different, if anything, about leadership today vs. when you started writing about it?

I think what's different is the degree to which you must expose yourself to different people and different ideas. You need to be re-educated every day. But I also like to remind people that people are still people and the things like listening, caring, smiling, saying thank you, and being warm never get old.  

What can leaders do to shift their culture from the old adage of product-led to being more customer-led?

It begins with hiring. I'm an absolute total fanatic on the topic of hiring: listening and caring, smiling, saying thank you, having empathy, and so on. I am a professional at hiring people. There are things that leaders do. They listen. They hire. They evaluate. They promote. 

What Does that coffee stain on your airline tray mean? A great questions from one of our listeners prompted Tom to share a fun story of meeting the late Herb Kelleher, co-founder, CEO and chairman emeritus of Southwest Airlines. This one example shows his passion for bringing excellence to everything you do.

I could talk to Tom all day, so if you'd like to catch the entire interview, you can do so here

I hope you enjoyed the first installment of my Think Forward Newsletter.

For further inspiration, follow me on:

LinkedIn Twitter Instagram YouTube

Mahalo, Tiffani