Tom Peters is saying basically the same.
They say ‘Take a deep breath. Be calm.’
I say ‘Tell it to Wal*Mart. Tell it to China. Tell it to India. Tell it to Dell. Tell it to Microsoft.’They say ‘Eighty-hour weeks will kill you.’
I say ‘Work 35-hour weeks, and the Chinese will kill you.’They say ‘continuous improvement.’
I say ‘Bold Leaps.’
This talk reminds me of the late 90s. The dot-com period had to be
one of the most wasteful periods I’ve ever witnessed. Working
eighty-hour plus is, in fact, terribly UNproductive as hell. Although it might work on factory floors – but Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco, and author of Seven-Day Weekend would argue with that.
Throwing time and/or money at problems typically results in
extremely inelegant, uncreative solutions that require even more time
and more money to sustain.
If you’re truly operating in a conceptual and idea age, you have got it backwards. You can’t win by playing the game using the same rules as your opponents. That’s yesterday‘s race. Where labor is cheap, they’ll just throw more bodies at the problem. That’s a crazy strategy to follow in a country where no one blinks forking over nearly $4 for a coffee drink.
