I confess I've probably read every Tom Peters book.

Oct'03: reading [Re Imagine] ISBN:078949647X (He associates its publisher, [DK], with home/garden books, but I think of them as makers of big children's picture/info books.)

I'm getting rather annoyed that Tom's audience seems to be all BigCo Middle Management. His version of being an Entrepren Eur is to make your [HR] department run like a Professional Service Firm.

Even his Brand You stuff seems targeted at someone who will jump from BigCo to BigCo in various slots.

But the New Economy transition seems to involve (musical) chairs being taken away at an accelerating rate. And the attitude of "Distinct or Extinct" doesn't seem like a reasonable [Macro Economic] model, even if it might be decent career advice. Perhaps it seems like too much of a Zero Sum Game.

• but he does (p41) get explicit about job creation vs destruction: Between 1980 and 1998 the US economy created 29M net new jobs ("2/3 high-paying"); this was after counting the elimination of 44M jobs. So we created 73M gross new jobs. Compare to the European Union, which destroyed basically none, but thus created very few.

  • but did the group who got the new jobs include the people who had lost the old jobs? Or was there a shift (from old white males to females, or to immigrants, etc.)? I wonder if there's any good research of what happened?

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