Dear Mr. Peters,

Can I call you Tom? We’ve been together now for two months so I think we can go to first names. After all, you came camping with me (remember, it rained the whole time and we huddled together under the tarp to stay dry? I even put you in your own Ziploc bag just be safe).

We’ve been to Halifax, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary (twice), Cranbrook, London and my friend’s country place. You’ve spent a fair number of nights on the floor beside my bed at home. And still, STILL! I’m just not that into you.

The Little BIG Things has some kind of BIG things wrong with it. First, it’s TOO BIG! Really!  Martin Luther managed to get 96 World-Changing, Skunkworking, cheese-moving BHAGs onto something he could nail to a cathedral door. At 600+ pages, your book could prop that door open.

Seriously! S-E-R-I-O-U-S-L-Y? How long does it take to unpack 163 things we should do to be better at our jobs?  Now please don’t think (please) that I’m not taking away some good fundamental ideas. I AM!!!!. I don’t think there are any I haven’t seen before but some – many? –most? – no, just some!  Bear repeating. Like #59, remembering to say thank you to everyone all the time. Or #112, Listening properly and openly. It wouldn’t be a Tom Peters book without that old standby #87 (Managing by Wandering Around). Good reminders to help us be brave and do good things. So here’s my issue, Tom.

Your book is

Almost

Virtually

Pretty Close to

IMPOSSIBLE to READ!!!!

Someone should slap the typographer who let you get away with this book. And someone else should take away all but one of the fonts  on your computer.  And pry that freaking exclamation !!! point key right off that keyboard (you may need to us lowercase L for your ones going forward).

There’s a reason books (and blogs and baseball cards and graphic novels) use only one typeface in a very limited range of styles, colours and sizes at one time. That reason is that human beings

FREAKING HATE

HATE. HATE, HATE

Stuff that is

hard to READ

You many THINK—hope—dream?***

That you are creating EMPHASIS!!!!

But you aren’t. You’re creating dissonance. Headaches. Sore eyes. Sore brains, and an overwhelming urge to spray this book with Ritalin and send it to bed.

Sweetheart, you’re not getting my attention; you’re sending me back into the arms of my Bon Appetite magazine where things go from left to right and life is a simple reduction of noise into a lovely glaze of strategy.

BUT I DIGRESS, TOM. Yes. YOU.  You seem to have taken your tweets, stuck them together into some blog posts and then rearranged them into loosely related themes and printed this book. Was that your intent? Was your publisher trying to squeeze a little more revenue out of your good name? This really would work better as a desk calendar.

I know you can write in whole sentences. I think you’re actually a rather good writer who is able to create emotion, drive a narrative and take the reader home to a new and exciting point of view. I don’t know if you meant to, but #107, the bit on Skunkworks, is a very interesting and inspiring read. Well worth the nearly three pages. But just when I was thinking we had got past the Idea-du-Jour format of this book, you whack me over the head with #108 (Screwing Around Vigorously). I can’t reproduce it exactly, but this is fairly close:

If, as I fervently believe…

Randomness Rules Our Lives…

then your…only (logical)…defense is-must be taking refuge in the message of the so-called…law of large numbers. That is, any success follows from tryin’ enough stuff so that the odds of doin’ something right tilt your way.

Conclusion:

Ultimate & Perhaps Only “Surefire” Winning Formula:

S.A.V.* ** ***

*Screw Around Vigorously.

**Start today.

*** Please.

What we have here, to quote Dirty Harry, is a failure to communicate and this is why I’m leaving you, Tom. Your search for excellence needs to continue without me. I just can’t go on with someone who communicates in mismatched sets of fridge magnet poetry tiles.

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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
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