TECHNOS

August 1, 2010

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Fall 1994 Vol. 3 No. 3

EdPress Winner

Interview with Tom Peters

By Carole Novak

Described by Business Week as the ‘best friend and worst nightmare’ of business, management guru Tom Peters calls for radical, revolutionary change in corporate organizations brought about by empowerment of the individual. His groundbreaking In Search of Excellence (1982, co-written with Robert H. Waterman, Jr.) was followed by A Passion for Excellence (1985, co-written with Nancy Austin), Thriving on Chaos (1987), and Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties (1992)—all international best-sellers. His most recent book, the first in a series of paperback originals published by Knopf/Vintage, The Tom Peters Seminar: Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations, debuted in Spring 1994. What messages does he have for educators? In this wide-ranging interview, Peters shares his ideas about lifelong education, technology, and the economy.

What parallels can American educators draw from your theories on chaos and liberation management?

I think back to 1984, when Ted Sizer published Horace's Compromise, and I remember reading through the book—it kept me awake all night a couple of nights—and absolutely shaking because the things he was saying were bizarrely consistent with the things that Bob Waterman and I had discovered when we wrote In Search of Excellence. The Coalition of Essential Schools could not be more consistent with the line of thinking that we have developed over the last 10 or 12 years. There is an eerie consistency. And I'd be hard pressed to find a single article on any topic that I've agreed with more than the Linda Darling-Hammond interview in the last issue of TECHNOS [Vol. 3, No. 2]. It's precisely the sort of thing that we have been talking about, whether she's talking about the shift from the classroom as a place where one hammered in facts to the classroom as a place where students are actively engaged, or the notion of new assessment criteria.

But change tends to come slowly in education, and you're always talking about speeding things up, acting now. How can we get those changes made?

I don't think change is coming slowly to education. I think systemic change is coming slowly. There are literally hundreds of schools around the United States that are experimenting effectively and are doing fabulous stuff. The problem is that there's no equivalent, unfortunately, to the Honda-Toyota-Nissan direct challenge to viability that we find in the auto industry. So the fact that there are hundreds of benchmarks worth emulating doesn't mean they are being emulated at anywhere nearly a rapid enough rate. But if the issue is, have we got good models?—we have got more than enough good models in the K–12 system of how to do it right. And that, to me, is the most frustrating aspect of the entire public sector issue. Whether the issue is education or anything else in the public sector, we cannot complain that we are waiting for Copernicus. There are any number of potential Copernicuses out there who have actually done this stuff and proven that it works. Nonetheless, the system as a whole remains in questionable shape.

Is it a question of privatizing all schools someday so that the marketplace will just take care of the problem?

I don't think it's that simple. In general, I think that privatization can be helpful, but I do not think if the whole K–12 world changed to a voucher-based or privatized system in the next 12 months, it would be a panacea. It's certainly no panacea for the world of inner city schools, though you can point to both private and public inner city schools that are fabulous. But the situation calls for a lot more than one-dimensional, one-variable solutions.

You've written that we should look to the movie industry as a model of a ‘learning community,’ that in the movie industry, people either get better every day, or they're out of a job. How does that apply to teachers and their leadership in teacher unions? Shouldn't they be getting better every day, too?

Well, I would go back to first principles. Stanley Davis wrote one of the better books on organizations of the future, Future Perfect, in which he coined the phrase ‘from K–12 to K–80’—the notion that education for life, for everyone, is going to be the minimal door opener for continuous employment as we move into the future. So I think that in some respects there is a degree of misguidedness to extreme emphasis on K–12 issues. What we need to be talking about—as Lewis Perelman did in School's Out—is a society in which education on demand, anywhere, anytime, anyplace, for everybody becomes part and parcel of the American way. My great concern is that with this new global village just in its preadolescence, with new kinds of technology-enhanced, technology-driven, technology-animated organizations that will call on the talents of whomever from wherever (meaning India and Thailand and the Philippines and Indonesia and China, as well as the United States), we'll remain competitive and keep wages relatively high, only to the degree to which the whole country becomes a learning community from age 6 to 80—or certainly 6 to 65. I think the 'schools debate' badly needs to be cast in that kind of broader framework.

I'm shocked that when I give a seminar in June of 1994 and spend 20 minutes on an arm-waving diatribe about education for life, people treat it as if it were a new and interesting idea. On the one hand, I was lucky—I chose the right mother. The notion that growing and reading and developing and educating yourself everyday came naturally to me. We haven't figured out in commercial society that one is getting better everyday—or one is getting worse. So the notion of school being imbedded in your psyche from cradle to grave to me is garden-variety, not particularly interesting, not particularly novel, common sense. And yet I hear people saying, ‘Wow! I'm really glad to hear you say that! It's really important! It's really a neat idea!’ I mean, the idea ain't deeply rooted yet. And that scares me.

Now, tying it all back to the teacher unions—those models of flexibility in America—they are a problem. Speaking as a lifelong Democrat with liberal leanings, I'm afraid that the teacher unions are not doing the United States a whole lot of favors at this stage of the game. I think, as people like Darling-Hammond said, we have not got to change the school system or improve the school system, but we've got to reinvent the K–80 system, if you will. And reinvention means technological reinvention, it means physical reinvention, in which the building itself—as Sir Douglas Hague writes in Beyond Universities: A New Republic of the Intellect—is not the main part of the main game. I'm a little bit of a Luddite, and I'm willing to come down strongly on both sides of the fence: I acknowledge that face-to-face, personal coaching is incredibly important. On the other hand, I think that we're going to be delivering education totally differently in the future than we have in the past, in the corporate world and in public-sector educational activities. And the unions just don't get it. Or perhaps they ‘get it’ all too well.

I'm a little skeptical that the old-guard educators will give up control of the classroom in a networked world. How are we going to get that to happen? Do we just have to wait till they die off?

That may be, frankly, the biggest argument for privatization in a market-based system. Something has to be done to destroy the power structure as we have known it for the last whatever—50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years. As a casual observer, I do not see a new generation of mid-thirties, phenomenally enlightened teacher-union leaders coming up, people like Lynn Williams, president of the steelworkers union, who's really with the program. They may be there, and I'm sure they're there in the trenches of union leadership, but it does mean acknowledging a need to reconceive teaching and to understand the movement from building-based learning. God knows, that's inconsistent with what the union is pressing for.

Do you think national standards will help us out in K–12 education in the future?

Not national standards of the sort the federal government seems to be railroading us toward. I'm appalled by the notion of national standards. A) It's a time when we need to be experimenting; B) it is a time when our economic security will be dependent on curiosity and creativity. To move to a system that focuses on measuring rote activity now is absolutely insane. I find it ironic that we are moving in that direction at precisely the time that the champions of rote, the Japanese, are very seriously questioning what they're up to. The corporate Japanese world, for example, is throwing money at creativity training like there wasn't any tomorrow.

Do you think this trend in the corporate Japanese world will sort of ‘trickle down’ into their education system, too?

I think it's got to, over time. The Japanese, who were highly critical of us 10 years ago for hollowing out our manufacturing and sending it over to low-cost Asia, now are doing the same thing. They're sending their manufacturing out of a very expensive Japan and over to Thailand and Malaysia, which means that they're in the same position we're in. They're left with a world where, to justify their high wages, they've got to become excellent in pharmaceutical research and software design and making movies and doing NIKE advertising campaigns and all of the intellectual-based activities that have become the basis of the advanced economy. So they have got no choice. Will it happen quickly? Of course it won't. The Japanese have a more sluggish bureaucracy and a much longer cultural attachment to the way they do things than we do.

Let's talk about the cultural differences between Asia and the United States. In Japan, the teacher is revered, and in the United States, not so much any more. Maybe that's why the teacher unions got together and decided to make a case for the teachers.

Number one: there couldn't be any tougher job than teaching; that's a given. Number two: my respect for the people who are doing it is enormous. Number three: we need to reinvent the schools and the notion of teaching. And I have no more idea whether 10 percent or 15 percent or 50 percent of teachers could clear the hurdles and make it in the new world. Because—to be slightly cynical—I suspect I could say the same thing about teachers that I could say about middle managers in the private sector who are becoming excess baggage. That is: they are very decent people; they care very much about their jobs—and yet, suddenly they find themselves in a new world where the essence of leadership is giving up power; they must be willing to operate in a very different kind of networked environment where they're coaches, flitting from here to there, rather than standing in front of the classroom doing the fact-hammering routine.

Look, we've been talking about ‘A Nation at Risk’ for 10 years now, and we've got fabulous experiments going, but the country isn't taking education seriously. George Bush ran as the education president—that was a joke! Bill Clinton didn't run as the education president, but what he's doing about education is just about as bad a joke as what Bush did—namely nothing. Yes, health care is important, and maybe it does belong at the top of the priority list, and yes, welfare reform is incredibly important, and maybe that ought to be number two—but from my narrow-minded perspective of the economic future, and I think Robert Reich at the Department of Labor would probably agree—training, retraining, and education is where it's at for the United States. But there's just no evidence of concern. It just ain't on page one! And it ought to be a page-one issue every day.

It sounds as though your opinion of Tech Prep and school-to-work transition programs and workplace training would be high. Do you think such programs will work for us?

It's not that my opinion is uniformly high; it's that it has to be done. And we do have some role models, at least. Governor John McKernan has written a book about the Maine apprenticeship program that lays out the case very well. We certainly do have examples of people who have done a brilliant job on a pretty broad-scale basis of changing around significantly what it means to move forward beyond K—12 without necessarily getting an associate's degree, let alone a full-scale university degree. And McKernan begins from evidence that says, even in 1994 and for the foreseeable future, the average person is not necessarily going to need a university degree. Maine's program is based on a K—13 model, if you will, which, to me, makes a lot of sense.

In The Tom Peters Seminar, you wrote about the university as a ‘talent bank and a library’ where ‘learners will access networked brainfood on demand’ and you mentioned National Technological University [NTU] in Colorado Springs and how it does satellite learning as an example. Won't this cause another change in higher education? Won't we still have the Ivy League and other expensive residential campuses catering to people who can afford them, while everybody else will be hooked into the satellite television courses at home?

Stanford University is a wonderful example of the schizophrenia, I think. On the one hand, Gerhard Casper, president of Stanford University, has been in the lead—to my utter amazement, being the traditionalist he is—in saying that we ought to go to a three-year university degree instead of a four-year degree. At the same time he's saying that, he is absolutely, positively, unequivocally rejecting the sort of Douglas Hague model of the university as a repository with less of an emphasis on the physical facility. If I'm reading correctly, at least between the lines, Casper is saying that the university of the year 2010 is going to look a lot like the university of the year 1994. Statistically speaking, he may be right; but I think that's the wrong approach. I do think the NTU model is a good model. I'm talking to you from Chicago, and I think it's great that the hoity-toity University of Chicago has just spent a whole lot of money to invest in a downtown campus in Chicago where it's teaching MBA programs to large numbers of people at night. Which is certainly something that Stanford University and Harvard University wouldn't ever deign to do.

Hague also says that, on the one hand, we're going to have incredibly high-paid superstar, Carl Sagan-type academics who will do their lectures online, and we'll have on-line libraries, etc.—but we're also going to have a class of tutors or mentors (hopefully something other than the standard university teaching-assistant model of 1994) who will guide and coach, one-on-one. The point is, the high-tech network only works if the high touch is there to complement it. Those who would drive the human being entirely out of the system and run the world via teaching machines are missing the boat. And yet I do think the notion of the old ivy-covered campus is relatively passé.

Though we don't really know. Actually, I feel always—completely—confused! I read the stuff that comes out of MIT's Media Lab by Nicholas Negroponte, saying we're going to get a ‘me paper’ and his little ‘know-bot’ is gonna give me exactly what I want to read. Well, every damn interesting thing that happens in life comes from serendipity. And most of the interesting innovations in Silicon Valley come from human beings who've had one too many beers, sharing stories they shouldn't be sharing in a bar. So how you combine the pub and the dormitory and the high-tech network—that's a trick that not a whole lot of people, in my opinion, are paying attention to. You've got the Luddites and you've got the techno-freaks, and you don't have enough people who are living squarely on both sides of the fence, which is exactly the way I think one should be living.

As editor of TECHNOS, I'm struck over and over by the notion that the story isn't the technology, it's the people who use it and are affected by it. How will we avoid what looks like the impending bifurcation of society in the future, the haves and have nots? How are we going to make sure that there will be equity of access to the technology that everybody's going to need?

Looking at it through the economic lens, the irony is, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. If you want the information highway to be built as quickly as possible, you must allow entrepreneurial incentives maximum sway with minimum impedance. If you allow that, you will get more, faster. But obviously, as is already happening, the question then is, Where do you put your information-highway, experimental interactive-TV stuff first? It makes sense to put it in communities that have an average annual family income of $65,000, not $23,000. On the other hand, if you mandate absolute equality and say you should be wiring the backwoods of Tennessee at exactly the same speed that you wire Santa Clara County, California, then you will in fact stop the progress of the information-superhighway implementation dead in its tracks. We've got this really horrible conflict.

There are no easy solutions because there's no such thing as a perfect world. We need to get this thing built, and it's going to cost tens of billions of dollars, maybe even a trillion dollars. The government hasn't got the money, so it's going to come from the private sector. And the private sector hasn't got the incentives, unless we let 'em go at it. And that's going to cost us—at least at the margin, in the short term—in terms of equality of access. At the same time—again, I am completely schizophrenic about it—the worst problem that this country and probably the world faces is this balkanization of the United States and every other country in the world.

The job I would most like to have in the federal government would not be Mr. Clinton's or Mr. Gore's. I would most like to be the chairman of the FCC, because I think what's going to happen there over the next 8 to 15 to 20 years will be incredibly important. The job that faces the FCC is to try to keep some kind of equality of access at the same time that it keeps the entrepreneurial spirit alive to get the thing built.

Is the education sector expecting too much of its corporate partnerships and sponsorships? Is there a point at which some of these folks are just going to say: ‘Look, we can't afford to take care of you and the whole country’?

No. They may be totally irritated at what they view as the absence of progress at the local, state, or federal levels, but they've got no choice. Because the wise corporations today—and increasingly that's going to include smaller and middle-sized businesses along with the biggies—understand that they can only survive if they have a fabulously skilled work force that continues to be trained forever. Which means that the notion of training—whether it's partnerships or direct investment in remedial education beginning with literacy training—defines their economic future, period.

Are there things that teachers and school districts ought to be doing differently when they approach the corporations for help?

If you go to Governor McKernan's book and see what Maine learned as it installed the apprenticeship system, you'll find what bureaucrats tend to do everywhere. That is, in their first pass, the government decided what ought to be done in terms of training content. To their amazement, corporations were not necessarily interested in the bodies that they were producing. At which point they went back to the drawing board and asked their would-be private sector partners, ‘What skills would you like human beings to be trained in?’ And it was a very different answer from the one that even the enlightened state of Maine's educational bureaucracy had come up with. Again, both sides have a case. The private sector is not willing to embrace the public sector because they see them as bureaucrats; the public sector is not willing to embrace the private sector because they see them as greedy, egocentric robber barons. And yet the Maine program really started to tick when they got the mechanism right for creating a permeable boundary between the employers and the skills-training program, so that suddenly the Maine program was producing what Maine's employers needed. And that's what the Germans do so well with their apprenticeship programs.

You once taught in the Stanford business school, and you're teaching all the time in your seminars now. From your perspective as a teacher, what do you think the purpose of education is? Is it just about economics?

It's obviously the essential philosophical question that nobody in education has ever answered fully. Are you supposed to be training ‘good citizens,’ or are you supposed to be providing the best education, whether it's literature or mathematics or whatever, to exist in the economy? It's clearly unanswerable. But my answer is: We're trying to develop self-sufficient, curious human beings.

I see.

And that may or may not involve William Bennett's Book of Virtues, and it may or may not involve training in how to use nails and hammers or how to write checks. I think the good news is, as I look at the future of the economy, that the economy is asking for employees who are committed to lifelong learning, who are curious, and who are self-disciplined. What the employer needs is what the society needs, and there could be a nice mesh there. We really aren't, one hopes, still trying to train people to work in Ford auto plants of the year 1917. The world is not all Microsoft, but we're looking more for people who can work on little teams, work independently, learn something new everyday, have high facility in the technology, but who are also interested in the arts and all the sorts of things from whence creativity comes in a brain-based economy. So I can paint a Utopian picture, which I think is a fair picture. It's just, I think, that we're a long way from being there.

You said you chose the right mother, and she raised you up right. Was she your favorite teacher? Do you have a favorite teacher?

My mother is number one on that list, clearly. Number two is my tenth-grade history teacher, who also happened to run the debate club and got me interested in yakking. But mainly he treated us tenth graders as if we were adults and kindled something that my mother had already started, which was a lifelong passion for history. My next favorite teacher was actually my battalion commander in the Seabees in Vietnam, who was really my first boss. And my fourth favorite teacher was my first boss at McKinsey and Company, when I became a consultant there.

So, your favorite teachers were not necessarily people who were trained to be teachers…

Absolutely not!

…but people who served as mentors.

What those four did for me—and I think this is good for the economy, good for the society—they made me more self-sufficient, they made me grow up, they made me incredibly curious about a particular subject. I think it's really a false dichotomy to talk about preparation for the economy and preparation for citizenship; it certainly is in the year 2000.

Making the Grade: How a New Youth Apprenticeship System Can Change Our Schools and Save American Jobs, by John McKernan, Governor of Maine, was released in September 1994 by Little, Brown and Co. of New York City.

Click here to access the School-To-Work—In Maine and across the Country sidebar that accompanied Governor McKernan's TECHNOS article.