By Nina Kruschwitz

Tom Peters is prone to writing in ALL CAPS, but he’s not really yelling — he’s just irrepressibly enthusiastic, a charismatic cheerleader for humanity and a deep believer in the vision that a commitment to one another and our shared goals is our best defense in the face of the ongoing tech tsunami. His recently published book The Excellence Dividend provided the impetus to sit down for a brief chat with the Journal about his past, the pivotal present moment, and our shared future.

The person you talk about as having the most influence on you was your first commanding officer in Vietnam; he was a big influence on your professional life. But after reading your latest book I wondered who else in your life primed you to recognize, say, the importance of the landscape guy you wrote about, who coiled up the hose in your yard. He was considerate, he was thinking ahead, and he cared about doing things right.

There may be a couple of answers. One thing Southerners really have down is good manners. My mother had a longer left arm than LeBron James, and if you weren’t hyper polite, if you didn’t do your “thank yous,” look out! No, but really, she was brutal about manners. It sounds like a joke, but at Christmastime in my mother’s world you were writing your thank you notes before the last present had been opened. I just think good manners are insanely important as you go through life.

And I’m not sure it’s related, but generally I just really like people, and I’m curious about people. I instinctively always talk to housekeepers in hotels. Maybe it’s genetic. I’ve had people say “Why do you talk to cab drivers?” Honestly, it’s because they’re so much more interesting than you or I. We’re basically spoiled rotten. But half the cab drivers in, say, D.C. are Ethiopian, and they’ve been through wars, revolutions, starvation, witnessed real brutalities. In almost all the most important human ways they’ve had more interesting lives than you or I have had.

I’d say it’s related. Manners can be a form of “fake it ’til you make it.” And manners have to do with acknowledging and respecting or even honoring other people. It’s an important basic teaching.

Fake it ’til you make it and you have it. I had a friend who was leading a nonprofit — another one of you taciturn New Englanders — and he was doing fundraising and he didn’t send thank you notes. It wasn’t instinctive. And I said to him “Do it because I’m telling you to do it. Because here’s the thing: when you do it the response will be so overwhelming that you will get addicted to doing it.”

I was out at 3M, giving a talk, and this lovely guy who had been to several of my seminars came up afterwards to speak with me. He’d just retired, and told me that at his retirement party one of the fellows who had worked for him a long time approached him with tears in his eyes and thanked him for a handwritten thank you note he’d written to him a dozen years ago, that the guy still had scotch taped up in his cubicle. One frigging little thank you note!

There’s a quote I love by William James, the psychologist, about how the deepest principle of human nature is a deep craving to be appreciated. He didn’t say “want,” he used the word “crave.”

There is definitely a lot of power in appreciation. And in reading! You quote from so many writers and books, your reading has clearly given you a real appreciation for the human condition, in business and otherwise.

I sometimes say what I do for a living is read books that business people are too busy to read and then translate them into my language. My mother says I was reading at 18 months. She herself was a history fanatic, and I fell in love with reading history by the second grade or third grade. I was not going to win any award for athletics but I read everything, all the time. And for what it’s worth I was an only child. It’s different now but only children knew how to take care of themselves; we knew how to occupy ourselves.

I’ve always said the best management book ever written is anything by Charles Dickens. If you’re interested in organizations, read fiction. It’s all about human relations. Someone said to me once “all you write about is people!” and I said “Well what else is there?!”

It’s funny, I was a little intimidated when I first started working with super engineering and business types 20 years ago. But then I realized that my liberal arts major world was completely foreign to them. Sometimes things I took for granted were treated like revelations by them.

When I was at Cornell we thought liberal arts majors were on vacation, because they only needed 120 credits to graduate and engineering required 180. There was a horrible arrogance. My thesis advisor, who I loved, said to me once, “when they come to get their MBAs all they want is finance and marketing. When they come back to the executive program at the age of 40 all they want is the people stuff.” Because at the end, once you’re in charge of anything, it’s a people business.

You’ve said that when you wrote your thesis, research showed only 30 percent of Americans enjoyed their jobs. And just recently some new research came out that said only 30 percent of Americans are engaged at work, which is pretty much the same thing. You’ve been around long enough to see a lot of cycles in business and business culture. What’s changed, or not? Where do you think we are now, in terms of putting people first or putting data first?

The short answer is I don’t care. But there’s a reason for that. I don’t give a fig about the Fortune 500 companies, because their only strategy seems to be investing in technology and cutting jobs. So screw ’em. And that’s on the record.

But something like 90 percent of us don’t work for for Fortune 500s, we work for the SMEs, small and medium-sized enterprises. And there are tens and hundreds of thousands of people in those companies who are doing things right, doing many things right. My goal is simply to encourage those people, and to hope that they in turn infect other people. You know a jillion people probably read In Search of Excellence, and I’ve got boxes of letters from people who wrote to me — elementary school principals and fire chiefs and people in “real organizations” — who get it. I just want to help those people. To use a football analogy, I don’t help somebody run a hundred yards. They already believed what I was saying. All I do is give them a good swift kick in the butt so they fall over the goal line and score the points.

There was a guy who attended a seminar of mine not long ago. Manny Garcia, one of Burger King’s biggest franchisers in Florida. He sat there for two days, and at the end, during the debrief, he stood up and said “I was here for two days and I didn’t learn anything new.” At which point I wanted to shoot myself. Then he says “It’s the best seminar I’ve ever attended.”

He said it was a blinding flash of the obvious. What matters is all the stuff that we all know that in the heat of battle gets pushed aside. You don’t take that literal extra five seconds. If you’re the boss of even a small business when you walk out in the morning, say “Glad you’re here.”

So small things matter.

It’s almost the most important thing. Quit focusing on the strategy and the disruption and the transformation and focus on the little tiny things that customers will remember. Because you will not have employees doing such things on a regular basis unless you’re doing them for your employee. As John DiJulius says, “Your customers will never be any happier than your employees.”

Now I’m sure you can find research that will disagree, but I’m willing to bet — and I said I’d set up a contest — that if you have two hotels, and one hires people based on data, and in the other one you get your 50 person team together and say “We’re going to make this the coolest job in the place,” then you may beat me with your numbers and efficiencies in the first three months, but in the long run, over the course of a year or years, my team of people who care, and who have so much customer contact, are going to win in every way.

Are you optimistic about the future?

Anyone who could be optimistic in the age of Trump ought to be institutionalized. But really, as I’ve said before, the only miracle is that we didn’t get a Trump 20 years ago. Trump’s talk about the coal miners is ridiculous. The coal industry lost a lot of jobs not because of regulation, but because of robotics. Inflation adjusted wages for white males between 25 and 64 has not increased since 1970. And are there frightening things going in Trump world: the name calling, the brutal attacks on the free press, the total lack of civility. And are some of those things connected with what’s going on in the tech world? The Zuckerbergs, the moral cesspool of Silicon Valley? I’m afraid they might be. I’m an old guy, and I can remember when Dave Packard was walking around the streets of Palo Alto.

Now some people, like my good friend Henry Mintzberg, write about changing the world, which is terrific. But anything that happens because of my books will be bottom up, not top down. I am optimistic that any businesswoman or man within their 12-person department or 20-person company can, a la that Richard Branson quote, create marvelous experiences for their colleagues who work for them. And I think especially given AI, you have the moral responsibility to help the people who work for you — whether they’re employees or freelancers — to be better prepared for tomorrow than they were when they arrived.

Do you think that’s enough? Do you think we might actually need to rethink some of the systems underneath all this that people have created, like capitalism?

I don’t know. It’s a good question. I think you can make a good case for guaranteed basic income, as people have been talking about it. It’s really interesting. Although there’s no way this Congress today would pass anything like that.

But relative to the future, remember, wildly intelligent people disagree dramatically about the speed and extent of the impact of AI. And you don’t need to worry about 2030 if you can’t make it to 2023, which is the next five years. And the world is not going to turn upside down in the next five years. So what can I do to make my employees’ and my customers’ lives better right now? You actually have to be a little schizophrenic. You’ve got to be laying the background for a very different world, and you still gotta get through tomorrow, or even the next five minutes, as the case may be. Both those things are crucial.

Tom Peters, thank you very much for your time.

I thank you.