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Tom Peters on Creating the 21st Century Organization October 16, 2008-11:00-12:30 pm EST An organization is a product of its people, and the best leaders are the ones that are able to build the organizational structure into a finely-tuned machine that is programmed for success. But in today's rapidly changing global environment the task of constructing an organization - whether from scratch or within existing frameworks - is becoming increasingly complex. In this session, Tom Peters will explore the critical function of creating the organization, and show how the most successful companies are those that design and layer simple and efficient structures built upon their most important resource - people who execute. Participants in this program will learn: How to focus on the basics - forming an organization that starts with having the right people getting the job done How organizational structure can impact performance How to avoid the question of "who makes the decision?" within complex organizational matrices and distributed leadership systems How to achieve excellence in cross-functional execution

When Tom Peters and Bob Waterman produced In Search of Excellence over 25 years ago, they effectively introduced the world of business to the notion of Excellence per se, a state of mind and daily practice not normally associated with enterprise, and an inspiring and profitable aspiration at a time when America's competitiveness was under full-blown assault. In short, then and now, the unwavering pursuit of Excellence, from the finance department to after-sales service, in the car dealership and police department as well as the bank branch and aircraft factory, provides the basis for an unmatchable competitive advantage-and acts on one and all as an ongoing spur to pathbreaking achievement. And in our global village, getting flatter by the day as it is, Excellence is a universal idea-ideal (think Olympics) that translates and transports across all borders.

In 1999, Search was honored by NPR as one of the "Top Three Business Books of the Century"-and ranked as the "greatest business book of all time" in a poll by Britain's Bloomsbury Publishing. Tom followed Search with well over a dozen additional international bestsellers. Among them: A Passion for Excellence (with Nancy Austin); Thriving on Chaos; Liberation Management (acclaimed as the "Management Book of the Decade" for the '90s); and the provocative, colorful Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. Along the way, several Tom Peters biographies have been published, including: Corporate Man to Corporate Skunk: The Tom Peters Phenomenon and Tom Peters: The Bestselling Prophet of the Management Revolution (part of a four-book series of business biographies on Peters, Bill Gates, Peter Drucker, and Warren Buffet). 

Leadership guru Warren Bennis, the only person close to both Tom Peters and the late Peter Drucker, told a journalist, "If Peter Drucker invented modern management, Tom Peters repainted it in Technicolor." In fact, as even Tom's book titles indicate ("Excellence" ... "Passion" ... "Liberation"), his passion is passion: Destruction & Re-imagining ... finding and liberating Talent for a hypercompetitive world ... the Herculean task of sustaining Entrepreneurial Excellence ... an enterprise-wide obsession with design that produces products and services of the sort that Steve Jobs calls "insanely great."

In 2008, Tom has once again shifted gears, and is renewing his dedication to the "eternal basics" of implementation-execution, among other things a topic of research he pioneered at Stanford in the 1970s. "We create and then get caught up in, me included, an endless parade of fads," he says, "but while the world is indeed changing, the basics of 'getting things done through people' remain the same as they were a hundred, or hundreds, of years ago-and it is failures in implementation that trip us up in 9 cases out of 10, from a primary school in Nashville or Nigeria to 'nation-building' in Basra and Baghdad.

Participation Options: Group | Individual

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