Transform white collar departments into "professional service firms" whose sole, powerful asset is knowledge. Idea: You are boss of a 23-person finance department in a division of a big company. Or, rather, you were boss of the finance department. Now, per our suggestion-model, you are Managing Partner, Finance Inc., a full-fledged professional service firm which is a wholly owned subsidiary of your division. Goal: Learn from the best professional service firms! Transform your unit! Today, even after re-engineering done well, the "department" doesn't look much like McKinsey, Andersen or Chiat Day. (And that's an understatement!) Aim, in short: Cool people (call them "talent") working on cool projects with cool clients. The aim redux: A cool Finance/Purchasing, IS, HR, Sales department. Why not? The cool professional service firm is just that: cool people/talent, a portfolio of cool projects, cool clients. Period. It's only asset -- literally -- is brains. It's only product is projects. It's only aim is truly memorable client service. So step #1, then, is the organization (PSF) . . . transforming "departments" in which white collar folks work into way cool professional sercie firms adding way cool value by doing way cool "stuff". Peters discusses making the most of presentations, working with outsiders on market analysis, how to imporve brainstorming meetings, how to develop relationships with clients and get the most out of them. 50 of Tom Peters's trademark insights on how to get the most our of your department. See also the other 50List titles in the Reinventing Work series by Tom Peters -- The Brand You50 and The Project50 -- for additional information on how to make an impact in the professional world.

Twenty first century, flexible capitalism creates new demands for those who work to acknowledge that all aspects of their lives have come to be seen as performance related, and consequently of interest to those who employ them (or fire them). At the start of the 21st century we can identify, borrowing from Max Weber, new work ethics that provide novel ethically slanted maxims for the conduct of a life, and which suggest that the cultivation of the self as an enterprise is the life-long activity that should give meaning, purpose and direction to a life. The book provides an innovative theoretical and methodological approach that draws on the problematising critique of Michel Foucault, the sociological imagination of Zygmunt Bauman and the work influenced by these authors in social theory and social research in the last three decades. The author takes seriously the ambivalence and irony that marks many people’s experience of their working lives, and the demands of work at the start of the 21st century. The book makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the nature of work related identities and the consequences of the intensification of the work regimes in which these identities are performed and regulated. In a post global financial crisis (GFC) world of sovereign debt, austerity and recession the author’s analysis focuses academic and professional interest on neo-liberal injunctions to imagine ourselves as an enterprise, and to reap the rewards and carry the costs of the conduct of this enterprise.

This wide-ranging volume brings together the commissioned papers that are the basis of James O'Toole and Edward E. Lawler's The New American Workplace, their follow-up to the groundbreaking 1973 Work in America report. Here leading scholars in the fields of business, management, and human resources offer new research and insightful analyses of existing studies, providing a definitive assessment of the state of the workplace today. Covering wage trends, worker health, education and the workforce, the effects of outsourcing, careers, human resources management, and a variety of other vital issues, this illuminating collection will prove indispensable for scholars, professionals, and policymakers.

The follow-up to Marshall Goldsmith's 500,000-copy bestseller The Leader of the Future, Global Leadership: The Next Generation systematically identifies what tomorrow's leaders will need to know, do and believe in order to successfully lead the global enterprise of the future. Drawing on the results of an extraordinary 2-year Accenture study of emerging business leaders, this book shows why the skills of today's global leaders won't be enough--and why tomorrow's leaders won't resemble today's. Goldsmith and his co-authors first identify five new "factors of leadership" and their implications: global thinking, appreciation of diversity, technological savvy, a willingness to partner and an openness to sharing leadership. They explain what it will mean to lead in an era where intellectual capital is the dominant source of value; how to lead people whose backgrounds and values may be radically dissimilar from yours; and why achieving personal self-mastery is now a fundamental prerequisite for leading others. From the evolution of "federated," semi-autonomous organizational structures to the personal leadership challenges now arising from globalism, this book offers unprecedented insights into the new challenges of leadership--and what it will take to meet them.

Winner of the 2003 Financial Times Germany/getAbstract Business & Finance Book Award Leading Geeks challenges the conventional wisdom that leadership methods are universal and gives executives and managers the understanding they need to manage and lead the technologists on whom they have become so dependent. This much-needed book? written in nontechnical language by Paul Glen, a highly acclaimed management consultant? gives clear directions on how to effectively lead these brilliant yet notoriously resistant-to-being-managed knowledge workers. Glen not only provides proven management strategies but also background on why traditional approaches often don't work with geeks. Leading Geeks describes the beliefs and behavior of geeks, their group dynamics, and the unique nature of technical work. It also offers a unique twelve-part model that explains how knowledge workers deliver value to an organization.

Tom Peters--brilliant, original, and perhaps the most inspiring and listened-to business thinker of our time--has a lot on his mind these days. And he wants to share it in The Circle of Innovation. The world of business is in a permanent state of flux, he argues, a state of chaos in which constant innovation is the only survival strategy--for the individual and for the organization. And he presents here a lifesaving handbook--both provocative and practical--designed to turn any organization into a perpetual innovation machine. In 400 seminars in 47 states and 22 countries in the last five years, Peters has reexamined, refined, and reinvented his views on innovation. Now he brings those seminars--and his passion--to the reader in a landmark book. It is meant, he writes, to both "terrify" and "enlighten." These are "times of matchless peril for those who fail to grasp the nettle...and times of matchless opportunity for those who do." To keep us alert, limber, and ready for action, he provokes and cajoles in chapter after chapter. Among his institutions and revelations: We Are All Michelangelos. He shows how to transform every "jobholder" into a full-fledged businessperson. All Value Comes from the Professional Services. How to convert sluggish staff units into Vital Centers of Intellectual Capital Accumulation. The System is the Solution. How to build great systems--which go far beyond nuts and bolts. Create Waves of Lust. Quality is not the automatic advantage it recently was. There is a pressing need to reverse the rising tide of product and service "commoditization." Tommy Hilfiger Knows. In a crowded marketplace, branding is far more important than ever before. It's a Woman's World. How to capitalize on the fact that women purchase/are purchasing agents for well over half of U.S. commercial and consumer goods. Little Things Are the Only Things. As the Blight of Sameness encroaches on market after market, design is often the best tool in services or manufacturing for sustainable differentiation. We're Here to Live Life Out Loud. Why transformational leaders of the future must have laser-like focus, tell the truth, and live on the lunatic fringe. The hallmarks of Tom Peters legend are an insatiable curiosity, an agile intellect, a pragmatic perspective, and an uncanny ability to gauge the global zeitgeist. These qualities are all brought to bear as Peters sets out to engage, enrage, and ultimately empower his readers, amid forces that are reshaping not only business but every aspect of human experience.