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Excellence has become transient…the Pursuit of Perfection gets in the way of ferreting out the Next Big Thing.

Tom Peters is doing what Tom Peters does best — promoting big ideas and himself along the way. Don't get me wrong; I'm a very big Tom Peters fan. His in your face, not-to-be-ignored style grabs me each time I encounter his writing. In August Tom published a manifesto on the site Change This! Tom's manifesto is titled This I Believe (TIB). I'll just say that Tom's TIBs are provocative. This one caught my attention:

#12. kaizen (Continuous Improvement) Is…Very Dangerous Stuff
Caught with our pants down by vigorous Japanese competitors, we Americans quickly copied their essential competitive ideas, such as Total Quality Management and kaizen. Fair enough! Brilliant, in fact! Yet these important notions are in part cornerstones of an earlier, industrial age…when winning products stayed on the shelves in showroom floors for years, even decades.
Now excellence has become transient (few teams win back-to-back championships in sports, the competition and rate of improvement have become so intense); and the fact is that the Pursuit of Perfection (at today's "sport") gets in the way of ferreting out the Next Big Thing. My de facto mentors in all this are media guru Marshall McLuhan ("If it works, it's obsolete") and IT guru Nicholas Negroponte ("Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy").

Can this be? Can Tom be calling our baby ugly? You bet he is. And I see why. kaizen is one part of a whole system that Toyota and others use to stay competitive. But it is just one part. When Toyota decided it needed a more hip car than a Corolla it didn't just improve the Corolla in one place and another. Toyota created an all new car — Matrix — and did so in record time, reportedly about one year from conception to market. That is one heck of a project. Competitors take three times as long to launch a new car (even when based on an existing car). But Toyota didn't stop there. They added three performance levels to the car and offered the same performance levels on the Corolla. Their market share and profitability show for it. Toyota has moved in front of Ford to be the number 2 auto manufacturer worldwide and they intend to knock on GM's door.

You can get Tom Peters' TIBs in his manifesto. You can also get the same TIBs in book form along with his thoughts on leadership, excellence, and my favorite — Pity the Poor Brown: Tom Peters Challenges Jim Collins, for Better of for Worse, currently only available in the book. The book is titled Project04: Snapshots of Excellence in Unstable Times. You will also find another Tom Peters' manifesto at Change This!. It's titled Off-Shoring. It's as provocative as TIB.

By the way, Change This! is a project started by Seth Godin of Purple Cow and Free Prize Inside fame. If you act fast you can get Seth's very popular The Bootstrapper's Bible for free. It's available at Change This! 'til December 1, 2004.