Doing 4% less does not get you 4% less.
Doing 4% less may very well get you 95% less.
That’s because almost good enough gets you nowhere. No sales, no votes, no customers. The sad lie of mediocrity is the mistaken belief that partial effort yields partial results. In fact, the results are usually totally out of proportion to the incremental effort.
Big organizations have the most trouble with this, because they don’t notice the correlation. It’s hidden by their momentum and layers of bureaucracy. So a mediocre phone rep or a mediocre chef may not appear to be doing as much damage as they actually are.
The flip side of this is that when you are at the top, the best in the world, the industry leader, a tiny increase in effort and quality can translate into huge gains. For a while, anyway.
Seth Godin
Seth Godin’s Blog , 11/7/2008
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Jim Hancock thinks about mastery in the context of what may be the only sports story you’ll ever hear from him.
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Critics sometimes suggest that competitiveness is foreign to a religion of love, meekness, and peace. They have no idea how hard it is to be meeker than one’s neighbor. There are abuses of competitive spirit, of course, as there are of love, meekness, and peace. But to compete - com + petere, “to seek together although against each other” - is not a vice. It is, in a sense, the form of every virtue and an indispensable element in natural and spiritual growth. Competition is the natural play of the free person. All striving is based upon measurement of oneself by some ideal and under some judgment. When that judgment is ominscient and omnipotent, such measurement is keener than any scalpel. Human sports, lotteries, and contests of every sort - in oratory, song, drama, horsemanship, the arrangement of flowers, the winning of tenure - would make no sense if the competitive spirit were foreign to human nature and learning. Most humans rejoice in it.
Furthermore, it is unlikely that individuals could ever discover their own potential unless they were blessed with good friends and rivals, whose exploits teach them how to push themselves harder than they yet have. To live in a slack age of low standards is a curse upon self-realization. To live among bright, alert, striving rivals is a great gift to one’s own development.
Michael Novak
The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (p. 347), Madison Books, 1991
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Lessons from Windows Vista
PC World Magazine just listed Windows Vista as #1 of The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007. I gleaned a list of how to disappoint customers from Dan Tynan's review.
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In chapter 3 of Back To The Cottage, John Sipple lays out 7 foundational
principles of Cottage industry.
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Companies that Choose to be Great Instead of Big
As we’ve worked with companies over the years, the easy assumption is that becoming great also means becoming big. And so many pursue growth to their own detriment.
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Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable
The Big Moo is a collection of essays on being remarkable by 33 remarkable business innovators.
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Being Part of Something Great
Hugh McLeod puts his finger right on the bruise when he says "Human beings want to be part of something."
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