All management gurus are liable to one potentially embarrassing question. If you’re so expert at management, why aren’t you rich? The best answer, of course, is to say that you are. That’s certainly true of Tom Peters, who has just celebrated his 60th birthday with a private publication entitled ‘Sixty’, containing 60 highly valuable thoughts. They range from ‘Revolution Now!’ to ‘Fun…is not a…Four-letter Word’ – typically pungent Peterisms.
Half-way along he advises, ‘Pocket trillions, embrace the Big Two’. What are they? First, know that ‘Women buy all the stuff!’ Second, remember that ‘we’re getting older!’ So has Peters himself won a fair share of the trillions to be gained from (1) taking advantage of female dominance of ‘virtually every market category you can name’ and (2) serving the new brand of oldsters, who are going to ‘’spend, spend, spend’ as they age, age, age?
Peters does have a significant consulting and speaking organisation, which has made him both well-heeled and very well-known. But the Big Two can’t have much connection with that. Anyway, the question (‘why aren’t you rich?’) is stupid and irrelevant. If the advice is great, what does it matter if the advisor hasn’t personally made a great financial success by using it? Nothing, of course, but that does mean that the guru has failed personally to follow another trenchant piece of his own advice:
‘The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we miss it’.
That echoes one of my own favourite themes. If you think small, that’s how you’re liable to end up. Thing Big (and execute well) - and Big is what you’ll become.
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