Great Is The Enemy Of Excellent
The standard is set in three places nobody can see
When was the last time you did something good enough, knowing you could have done it better, and nobody ever found out?
Everyone has a moment. I have several, and one of them cost me six months.
The mechanism
Great is a comfortable place to stop. It is good enough to be praised, and just short of what you were capable of. Because it gets praised, it gets repeated. Because it gets repeated, it becomes the standard. And an organization whose standard is "good enough to be praised" has capped its ceiling without ever deciding to.
This is not a motivational point. It is a mechanical one.
Where excellence is actually decided
Not in the deliverable. In three places, all of them invisible.
The work you redo that nobody asked you to redo. Nobody will ever know. That is precisely what makes it the standard rather than the performance.
The thing you check twice when once would have passed. Most errors that damage a reputation would have been caught by the second check that somebody decided to skip.
The conversation you had that you could have avoided. Avoided conversations do not disappear. They become someone else's problem later, usually at a worse moment.
The honest cost
I am not going to pretend this is free. Excellence costs time, comfort, and occasionally being the person who slows things down. Anyone selling you a standard without naming its cost is selling you a feeling.
Holding it without becoming insufferable
Apply it to your own work first, and visibly. Be specific rather than disappointed. Praise the invisible work when you catch someone doing it. And never hold others to a standard you are not currently paying for yourself.
Why this is the talk I most want to give
I told a client three weeks on a project that took seven months. That was not an engineering failure. It was great salesmanship and poor preparation, and the preparation was the part nobody would have seen.
Great is what they will accept. Excellent is what you will know. You only have to live with the second one.
This is my keynote When Excellent Is Possible, Great Won't Do!