GUEST POST from Julie Anixter
JUST when I was feeling completely physically and spiritually exhausted by the dumb and dumber Debt debate….this popped onto the screen of my i-phone and I was momentarily renewed by the automatic smile inside that this voice so often provokes:
The “2Rs”: Relentless. Resilient. All you need to know??
and then…
In the Resilience. Grant, looks calmly from his pipe, to a reeling Sherman after 1st day rout of Union at Vicksberg: “Lick ’em tomorrow.” (He did.)
16 hours ago
tom_peters
followed by
RESILIENCE is hire-able. (Look for it.) RESILIENCE is trainable; be explicit. RESILIENCE is promotable. RESILIENCE these days = Strategy.
In these three tweets we get a slice of the relentlessly resilient mind of Tom Peters. Like the rings of a tree they show us the natural history, the whole shooting match at a glance, and why he is a decades-worthy voice to listen to or better yet catch like a trout in the stream of Twitter. Wait, wait, wait, nothing happening, river sure is pretty in a mind numbing kind of hypnotic way…Oops there’s a tug, ah, there…GOT IT.
HE is Relentlessly Resiliently expressing his DNA and on his game as grand Observer/Interpreter of….the world. His willingness to not just weigh in but shout at, cajole, murmur, and stir the global conversation might have just been the pre-cursor for Biz Stone, as Tom is master of soundbites aka 160 character epithets. Short and only sometimes sweet. Pungent and provocative is more like it. And yet, I lost count of the number of people who looked me in the eye (when I worked for Tom) and told me “I built my business on (Thriving on Chaos)” I knew exactly what they meant. I built the training department at Anixter on Tom’s ideas writ large in books and especially videos…“The stain on the tray table just MIGHT mean something about the engine maintenance!”
What really happened is that the collective WE in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s built our practices on Tom’s inexhaustable supply of content and courage. Including I might add, a young Seth Godin at Stanford.
Tom! The Chaos is very real and it keeps coming. So please keep going. Keep tweeting. And while I realize you don’t need to be asked…because it’s what you do for breakfast, this is a Warning Across the Bow: The first in a series of love letters to Mr. In Search of Excellence and an exceptional life worth living on Innovation Excellence.
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