Tom Peters looks a bit like a TV evangelist, one minute roaring at his audience and the next dropping his voice to a sotto voce murmur for extra effect.

This was the Tom Peters show, a four hour seminar which took place at Fairmont Southampton yesterday to a packed audience of about 400 business people.

Ernst &Young, XL and The Bank of Bermuda sponsored the event, paying an “obscene amount of money” to bring in the man whom Accenture ranked number two in their survey of 50 top “Business Intellectuals”.

Any left over money from ticket sales went to E&Y's chosen charities, Youth Net and Knowledge Quest.

Mr. Peters, 60, warned his audience that he would use strong language, saying that he was quoting people who are smarter than him.

The main thrust of his seminar was to challenge conventional management - he is an advocate of change.

Most of his doctrine is radical, much of it impractical for a somewhat change-averse environment like Bermuda, but some of it struck a chord with the Bermudians in the audience.

He has a healthy disrespect for boards of directors which consist of : “ten old white men, one female human resources manager and one afro-caribbean director of communications thrown in”. (Big applause)

His “favourite topic” is women - “Women are abused” he states, by glass ceilings, leisure industry marketing campaigns and the long queues for the ladies facilities at public buildings. (Huge applause)

He thinks Chief executive officers (CEOs) should become CDOs, “Chief Destruction officers”.

What he means is that corporations need to get rid of dead wood, and they need to “destroy” in order to create. He took Nokia as an example, the young chief executive who took over a company which owned a lot of timber, sold all the company's previous business and went into wireless telecommunication.

The talk could have been subtitled “What Jack Welsh, chief executive at GE, did right and wrong.”

Mr Welsh featured in several examples of healthy destruction in a corporation.

Apparently he became known as “Neutron Jack” because every time he went to a GE operation, it was like a neutron bomb had hit it: only the building remained standing.... all of the people were gone.

This message seemed a bit extreme for an existing corporation, particularly in Bermuda - Mr Peters proposes firing all your unproductive employees.

Unfortunately he did not touch on the immigration issues, employment tribunals and possible industrial action that might result.

Mr. Peters enjoys contradictions: part of Bermuda's success, he believes comes down to its lack of natural resources.

As a result, it has had to rely on its talent: “Natural resources, I've come to believe, are an awful thing to have.”

Here's another Peters contradiction: “ The secret of fast progress is inefficiency.” People do not make progress unless they try new things. Most times, new things fail. But sometimes they succeed. As a result, Mr. Peters says “I would rather be known for an audacious failure than a mediocre success.”

He asked his audience to take this one adage seriously: “Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.”

In other words, give points for trying and when you evaluate people at the end of the year, promote the guy who stuck his neck out, even if he nearly lost it.

Quoting Nicholas Negroponte, he added: “Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy.”

In a section that could have been written exclusively for the Bermuda tourism industry, Mr. Peters said: “People should not be selling services, they should be selling an experience.”

He went on to quote what he regards as the greatest book on marketing ever: Disruption by Jean Marie Dru.

“Club Med is more than just a ‘resort', it's a means of rediscovering oneself, of inventing an entirely new “me””

Marketers need to understand that “experiences” are as distinct from “services” as “services” are from goods.”

Ultimately, they should be in the business of dream fulfillment.

Mr. Peters' talk also touched on recruiting and developing talent, a critical subject in Bermuda.

He said that the people who wouldl lead us to the promised land included “upstart employees”.

“Innovation,” he said “is easy: Hang out with freaks.” Employ and promote more women.

Employ and promote more oddballs. employ and promote more people who do not have top academic qualifications - People who graduate from places like Stanford must be boring, he suggested.

To get into a top school like that, you need a grade average of 4.1 and that can mean only one thing: “The kind of kid who sucked up and drew within the lines from birth.”

On the subject of diversity, he boomed: “I am a diversity fanatic!

“And I don't have a PC (politically correct) bone in my body.”

Diversity breeds creativity and innovation, he said.

Today Mr. Peters will be holding a school seminar entitled “ Future Leaders”.

To the business leaders at yesterday's seminar he gave a final challenge about talent: “Put up your hands if you have a problem in your company of too many good leaders.”

In the absence of any show of hands, he concluded “May I suggest you look at that section of society who make up 51 percent of the population.”