The Articles - Tom Peters Interview
Continuing the series of articles moving from my wooden file cabinet in the attic to the electronic file cabinet that is CO, here is a 1993 Forbes ASAP interview with Tom Peters. Rich Karlgaard - then Forbes contributor, now Forbes Publisher - conducted the interview on business, leadership, management, reading, productivity and other topics.
The interview is full of Peters' gems such as this one related to creativity:
"The essence of scientific creativity is unexpected streams of information crossing each other in oddball ways at propitious times. Being organized about information collection is fascist. There is something in the process of walking through library stacks and having your eye accidentally light upon some 13th-century treatise that gives you the answer to your conundrum in quantum mechanics. It's that exposure, those eclectic exposures. I mean, find me a truly significant innovator who doesn't have some form of significant eclecticism. It's a delight to hear that John Sculley and Bill Gates read - and not only the stuff they're supposed to read but a lot of stuff they are not supposed to read."
Another treat:
". . .I believe in always leaning radically in the direction of the market as far as you possibly can. The reason I get up on stage and say such wild-ass things is because I think that most of our big companies are really lousy at it. That's the goddamn scandal about the free market. Almost always, the last people who want to blow the cold winds of the market into every nook and cranny of the company are the people running the joint."
Tom Peters 1993 interview with Forbes ASAP here (in PDF format).
Just read a poignant anecdote in the Jobs biography. The suits (those in charge at the time - business types) were totally opposed to the 1984 commercial launching the Mac.
"The worst commercial they had ever seen." said Sculley.
E.
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