Other competent business is his forte

During the course of his largely one-man show at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall last week, he pointed to the problems that many large corporations are facing.

''What do you do when you are a large dopey company that is out of ideas?'' he demanded. ''You merge with another large dopey company that is out of ideas to create an even bigger dopey company that's going nowhere.''

He pointed to the merger of Chrysler and Daimler-Benz. ''Chrysler has only one thing to learn from Daimler-Benz - how to make large ugly cars, how to take a long time doing it and how to integrate vertically to drive their costs up!''

What has this to with recruitment? Well, as he said: ''Who is a 26-year-old going to work for: a vast company where he might have some influence when he is 70?'' The man who has been described by both Fortune magazine and The Economist as the guru of management gurus and by Business Week as business's ''best friend and worst nightmare'' says the main concern of fast-growing companies is ''hot talent''.

Many of the corporate deals taking place in the US especially are about buying the talent in target companies rather than buying physical assets or market share.

In 18 months Microsoft spent $1.5 billion buying 47 companies at an average price of $32m. Hewlett Packard was smarter.

In 12 months it bought 30 companies at an average price of $20m, and employing an average of 11 people.

''Hewlett Packard is buying hot talent,'' said Peters. ''The fastest growing company in Silicon Valley is Cisco Systems. It is growing by acquisition. It is buy talent.''

He outlined the growing cost of talent. A Bachelor of Science in the US would cost $30,000. By the time the same person gets an MBA from a good business school, his going rate is $100,000.

If he has worked for a top-rated company such as McKinsey or PepsiCo, his value is $150,000 to $200,000. And by the time he has gone through the experience of founding his first start-up company, his price would be anywhere between $500,000 and $3m.

So buying a proven team of around a dozen people and the company they work for for $20m - less than $1m per person - begins to look like good value.

Peters described the major assets of Microsoft and computer chip manufacturer Intel as ''pure intellectual talent''. He also pointed to the attitude of the new generation of companies to recruitment.

The personnel director at Netscape, for example, is Margie Mader and her title is ''the Director of Bringing In Really Cool People.''

These companies also have a different attitude to their personnel once they are in employment. Bob Pittman of America On-line admiringly described the approach of Steve Ross who built up the Time Warner company: ''Steve had a wonderful philosophy that people got fired for not making mistakes.''

In other words, if you do not make mistakes you cannot find out what really does not work or hit upon truly innovative ideas.

''The only way of learning is by screwing up,'' he said. ''The only way of learning fast is by screwing up fast.''

It was a point Peters kept emphasising with his favoured quote of a very quotable day, that incremental improvement is the worst enemy of innovation.

''The stupidest sentence in the English language is ''Do it right the first time'','' he said. ''Nobody ever did anything interesting right the first time.'' The message for recruiters is that the talented employees of today and tomorrow are going to turn their backs on traditional companies which do not allow full reign to their creativity.

Even more important is that successful companies will hire them and encourage them to make mistakes to produce genuine innovation. If the talent is not on the market, maybe the companies that employ it will be.

Once recruited the way to handle all talent, including management, is to give them scope. Among 50 ''must do'' survival strategies Peters handed out to delegates were the instructions: ''Within 90 days, triple spending authority throughout the firm, from the mail clerk to the division general manager.

''Insist on a maximum of two levels of management between the bottom and the top in any division-size unit. In every facility, review detailed operating results with all hands weekly. Within the next nine months, eliminate first-line supervisors.''

The good news on training is that it is more than just a ''must-do''. He says: Recognise training as a research and development expenditure: fund it with 3% of gross revenue.''

Other strategies are more extreme: ''Eliminate all job descriptions. Now. Destroy all organisation charts. Now.''

This is where gurus and their messages come in for justifiable criticism. The man who made his name with the books In Search of Excellence and A Passion for Excellence now ''regrets'' much of what he has written.

Pity the poor employers and their staffs, then, who took him at his word - or perhaps it should be those who take him at his word now. Having to produce a book of startling ideas every few years encourages fads and short-lived fashions.

It led to the description of being the employees on the receiving end of these constant changes as The BOHICA Syndrome, standing for Bend Over - Here It Comes Again.

Among all Peters' epigrams, cute sayings and endless quotations, though, there are still some useful facts worth gleaning.