Tom Peters is well-known as a proponent of doing WOW projects. Here’s how he describes them in Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age:

The road to success is paved with … WOW Projects. Project: a task that has a beginning and an end, as well as deliverables along the way. WOW Project: one that has “goals and objectives” that inspire.

WOW Projects are:

• Projects that Matter.
• Projects that Make a Difference.
• Projects that you can Brag About … forever. [I really, really, really dislike bragging, but you see the point. Very interesting spin if you interpret this in a God-centered way and take “forever” literally…]
• Projects that Transform the Enterprise.
• Projects that Take Your Breath Away.
• Projects that make you/me/us/”them” Smile.
• Projects that Highlight the Value that You Add … and Why … You Are Here on Earth. (Yes. That Big.)
• WOW Projects are … not hype.
• WOW Projects are … a necessity. (New necessity.)

Yesterday I posted on Tom Peters list of how to attract talent to your organization from his book Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. But how do you identify talent? Peters covers that as well. He argues that a “true exemplar of talent:

1. Displays passion.
2. Inspires others.
3. Loves pressure.
4. Craves action.
5. Knows how to finish the job.
6. Thrives on WOW.
7. Exhibits curiosity.
8. Embodies “weird.”
9. Exudes a sense of fun.
10. Thinks at a high level.
11. “Gets” talent.

A good point from Tom Peters’ Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age:

To attract, retain, and obtain the most from Awesome Talent, organizations will need to offer up … an Awesome Place to Work: A place where people not only get paid “their due,” but also … get to initiate and execute great things.

Peters then offers up his “Talent 25” for how to do this (he expands on each of these points; I won’t do that here, but do recommending getting the whole book):

1. Put people first! (For Real.)
2. Be obsessed!
3. Pursue the best!
4. Weed out the rest!
5. Focus on intangibles!
6. Change the profile of HR!
7. Forge a bold HR strategy!
8. Take reviews seriously!
9. Pay up!
10. Set sky-high standards!
11. Train! Train! Train!
12. Cultivate leadership aspirations from the get go!
13. Foster open communication!
14. Lead by “winning people over”!
15. Reward “people skills”!
16. Show respect!
17. Embrace the whole individual!
18. Measure for uniqueness!
19. Honor youth!
20. Create opportunities to lead!
21. Relish diversity!
22. Liberate women! (There is a talent shortage — do not overlook 50% of the population.)
23. Celebrate the weird ones!
24. Provide a setting for adventure!
25. Revealing the big secret! (Although Malcolm Gladwell might want to nuance this [see his Outliers: The Story of Success], Peters puts it this way: some people are more talented than others in an area, and some are way more talented in that areas.)

From Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management:

There is no surer way to undermine a new business venture than to measure it by the profits generated, rather than by the learning accumulated.

He gives IBM as an example of a company that has learned this lesson:

IBM’s top-level growth team understood that when it comes to building a new business, you have to learn before you earn. Given this, they wanted to counter the debilitating assumption that if you’re not holding a new venture accountable for profits, you’re not holding it accountable for anything. Many of IBM’s past growth efforts had stalled when an early push for profits limited a venture’s potential upside by prematurely truncating the learning and experimentation that would have, in time, yielded a more powerful, and better targeted, business model.