While Peters may be overcompensating, shy self-effacing leaders don’t get the job done. I don’t mean that to be a truism, only the general case. As a society, people are living their lives just below what would be remarkable. It’s time to change that. I love Peters because he has no regard for what others think of him. Or maybe he’s crafting the whole thing! Either way, bug things will get done.

Tom Peters is one of my favorite irreverent writers too. I even named him the ‘project mage’ by excellence in a so-called ‘evolving’ web site I started (but did not get to evolve)a couple of years ago (www.theprojectpage.com). For those interested about a six point summary of Peter’s thousands of pages, I include one in this ‘non-evolving’ web site that is still relevant, as far as I know. Here is the address of this ‘mega-small’ summary : http://www.theprojectpage.com/id26.htm . I even got an appreciation for it and encouragements by e-mail from Tom’s own outfit PR manager.

As for ’shy, self-effacing, reserved’ leaders they do not inspire me any confidence as often the shyness-reserve hides devious and not-so-clean political savvy. Just the gut feel here of the very extroverted, big mouth and very direct me-myself-and-I.

Cheers,

Claude

I couldn’t hit the reply button fast enough after reading this post. I think you’re onto something really big here (at least for me!) as it relates to the difference between being a project managers and project leaders.

Project managers who are more administrators and coordinators–directing efforts through compliance to milestones–probably take too much comfort in the Collins approach. But who gets motivated by an approaching milestone? What pride of accomplishment can be declared in percent complete.

There’s something more to explore around Peters’ concepts especially for those who want to be Project leaders.

Brian