The Re-Birth of Excellence

Since today is Earth Day, I wanted to share with you what is a cornerstone of my belief system. The article itself is not so much about the Earth as it is about good stewardship. I believe that good stewardship demands excellence and integrity, and if those two qualities were at the forefront of all we do as a species, well; we would have an incredible planet, truly a magical world!

We live, or so it seems, in a time where the pursuit of riches has left us with an enormous debt to pay. The abysmal state of the economy bears witness to the fact that many of our current business models have failed miserably. The airwaves are abuzz with the voices of financial analysts struggling to explain the situation and even more so to prescribe solutions. They tell us this monetary quagmire is a complicated issue that will be very difficult to untangle.

I have a thought or two about this. To begin, I do not subscribe to the notion that the cause is difficult to explain. Using numbers to explain it however is the wrong approach. I also believe that defining the cause immediately reveals the long-term solution. This implies that the solution is easy to describe. The question then becomes; given a solution, will we choose to act?

To make my argument, I will first define a few attributes that must be a part of the equation. You can think of them as the ingredients required for a successful outcome. Then I’ll paint a little picture and pose some questions meant to stimulate thought on the subject.

Commitment to Excellence

A commitment to excellence ultimately delivers quality and value. Pride in what we have accomplished compels us to continue producing quality and value. This desire drives mentorship, which is commonplace within entities that have a commitment to excellence. Mentorship develops new talent allowing for product improvements and innovation.

Striving for personal excellence will lead to personal development and self-improvement. When we strive to be more than we are, we make the world a better place. We do so because improving ourselves by extension improves the world around us.

Integrity

“Integrity may be seen as the quality of having a sense of honesty and truthfulness in regard to the motivations for one’s actions.” – (From Wikipedia)

You could say that integrity breeds excellence. Integrity will evaluate methodologies but it is not defined by them. Rather, integrity has everything to do with approach, personal philosophy, substance and character. When you lose integrity, you lose trust. It doesn’t matter if you are trying to sell a product or re-kindle a relationship. Both propositions are virtually impossible without trust.

Integrity always calls for win-win situations.

Revenue vs. Profitability or Quantity vs. Quality

Much of today’s corporate thinking focuses more on revenue than it does on profitability. Growth in revenue equates to an expansion of market share. Increases in market share are great for investors but if a company shows a loss of revenue, they are perceived to be losing market share. This inhibits companies from focusing more on profitability and leads to a place where quality takes a second seat to quantity.

I don’t know about you, but running a profitable organization is at the top of my list, just under excellence and integrity. I’d rather sell one item for ten dollars that nets me four dollars profit than have to sell two at ten dollars to make the same profit. My revenue may be higher, but the profitability remains the same and my cost of doing business goes up. This becomes very apparent when you start thinking in higher volumes.

I elaborate further on this point in an article titled The Mixed Blessings of Corporate Metrics.

How Things Are

As driven by today’s economic model, to drive market share, companies need to get products out faster and in greater quantities. In order to do so, many of them compromise their commitment to excellence by sacrificing quality for quantity and profitability for revenue. Companies that were once profitable now labor under enormous debt loads to try to keep up with demand. The result is everything from cars that break down sooner to gardening implements that barely make it through a season or BBQ’s that rust out within a few years. Stated otherwise, we end up with inferior products.

That’s ok because we, the “consumers”, will soon run out and buy more stuff. Competition for this market share drives companies to lower their prices and so they make more compromises in product development. Lower prices motivate us to go and buy more stuff. First though we need bigger and bigger houses to keep all that stuff in. Still, we need to dispose of the stuff we have no room for and so to the dump it goes, along with all the packaging used for the new stuff.

What used to be mounds of garbage have now become mountain ranges of scrap. It is a travesty that these heaps of our own making now measure our character. They will stand for many years, a testament to our wasteful and careless nature.

Makes you wonder doesn’t it?

What has happened to excellence? Where did it go? What happened to the notion that quality represents value? Where is mentorship today? Where was the integrity in so many of the financial products we have read about recently that carried far too high a risk? How could financial institutions in “good conscience” present customers with a product destined to fail? Could it be because there was no commitment to excellence? Was it driven by greed? Clearly, a win-win mindset was not present in the thinking that led to the development of these products.

How else are we to explain that a used shovel I purchased built in the 50’s is in better shape than the new one I purchased not so long ago?

What happened to the specialty stores? Many were forced to shut down because they could not compete with the emergence of the mega-stores. Do you know what we lost? Expertise, value and quality of service. For the sake of a few percentage points in savings, we traded expertise for lower pricing on inferior products. Sure, many of these stores provide us with instant gratification by allowing us to return products for a full refund. These products bejewel our landfills and the mega-stores eventually falter because there was not enough profit in their coffers to support the model. The lack of expertise will eventually lead us back to the smaller specialty stores.

Why after centuries of building roads do we still build intersections only to dig them up a few times within a month of their completion? Why does one man dig while three others watch him? Poor planning indicates an absence of excellence. We build cities on top of old cities without updating the infrastructures that support them. A century later, we have cities that require multi billion dollar initiatives to provide sewage treatment systems. We then argue that it’s too expensive and unnecessary because the ocean is big enough to handle the waste we will indiscriminately dump into it. Imagine for a minute doing this at our own home. We break some municipal bylaws and pile mounds of rotting rubbish all over our lawn. We would be told in no uncertain terms to clean it up. If we used the “it’s too expensive” excuse, we would likely pay a fine, potentially lose our home or possibly end up in jail. We should all be grateful that the planet has not sentenced us in this way .. yet. So why is it wrong at an individual level, but not at the collective level?

Where is the “integrity” in this picture? There is none, and we are all complicit in the making of it. We got what we paid for and now we have to pay to get out of this mess. I just don’t think we need to pay in dollars. We need to pay with a commitment to creating an environment conducive to the re-birth of excellence. It starts when we stop thinking of ourselves as “consumers” and begin to see ourselves as “citizens”.

The Solution …

Excellence and integrity demand quality. Without them, absolute failure is the only possible outcome.

If every one of us makes a personal commitment to excellence, we will begin to see the re-birth of integrity. Guided by integrity, we will start to make smarter choices and build a much better world; one devoid of so many man-made crises, a world where we consider the needs of others as highly as we do those of our own.

In closing this article, I want to say it is not my intent to suggest that there are no companies or individuals out there committed to excellence. They do exist and are all around us. If you are one of them, thank you! Please continue to shine as an example of what is possible when we commit to being the best that we can be.

Photo Credits

NYSE © Ryan Lawler – Public Domain

Landfill © Ashley Felton – Public Domain

Originally posted at synaptici.com on March 25, 2009

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• Look After the Little Things
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