Re-Imagine!

Peters wrote this in 2003 as a manifesto arguing that incremental improvement was insufficient and that organisations needed to be rebuilt for a period in which white-collar work would be automated or offshored, brand and design would determine value, and talent would be the only durable asset.

His specific arguments include: that most white-collar work is administrative processing that will be eliminated, which he estimated at a very large share of existing jobs; that the surviving work is the work that cannot be routinised, meaning design, relationship and judgement; that design is not decoration but the primary source of differentiation once functional parity is reached; that women constitute both the majority of purchasing decisions and an underused management talent pool, and that most companies are organised to serve and employ men; that professional service firms are the model for how all organisations will be structured, as project teams assembled around specific work; and that talent should be recruited and managed as sports teams recruit rather than as bureaucracies hire.

The book's presentation is deliberately aggressive, with heavy typography, exclamation, colour and layout, which is intentional and which many readers find unreadable.

Several predictions were directionally right, particularly on white-collar automation, on design as differentiation and on project-based organisation. The book has no evidence base beyond assertion and example, the tone substitutes for argument in places, and the twenty-year-old specifics are dated. Read it as provocation rather than analysis.

American management writer and former McKinsey consultant who co-wrote In Search of Excellence and built a long practice in management speaking.

In Search of Excellence pulled management writing away from portfolio matrices and toward observable practices at operating companies, and the later books press the same emphasis on execution, customer obsession and organisational energy. Operators read the collections for concrete habits to copy rather than for a framework to fill in.