The Perils of Being Perfect

In the book, “In Search of Excellence” written by Tom Peters, one of the “traits” of successful companies is in their passion to excel in their endeavor. It is suggested, “that outstanding performance often demands dedicated, even passionate, single – mindedness”. However, another author disagreed with the observation. Danny Miller believes that though passion can ultimately leads to success. It may also be the very reason of their failure and their ultimate demise. Danny Miller in his book, The Icarus Paradox described 4 main trajectories stemming from the passionate pursuit of excellence. They are:
· The focusing trajectory takes punctilious, quality driven Craftsmen, organizations with masterful engineers and airtight operations, and turns them into rigidly controlled, detail obsessed Tinkerers, firms whose insular, technocratic cultures alienate customers with perfect but irrelevant offerings.
· The venturing trajectory converts growth – driven, entrepreneurial Builders, companies managed by imaginative leaders and creative planning and financial staffs, into compulsive, greedy Imperialists, who severely overtax their resources by expanding helter – skelter into businesses they know nothing about.
· The inventing trajectory takes Pioneers with unexcelled R&D departments, flexible think – tank operations, and state of the art products, and transforms them into utopian Escapists, run by cults of chaos loving scientists who squander resources in the pursuit of hopelessly grandiose and futuristic inventions.
· The decoupling trajectory transforms Salesmen, organizations with unparalleled marketing skills, prominent brand names, and broad markets, into aimless, bureaucratic Drifters, whose sales fetish obscures design issues and who produces a stale and disjointed line of “me – too” offerings.
What all this trajectories have in common are that all of them tend to focus on their excellence and pursue it to perfection without considering the practicality of such mindless pursuit. They may produce the most perfect cell phone in the world but the market really doesn’t want a perfect phone with all the loaded features but just simply a phone that they could call their love ones. They could pursue an opportunity so aggressively and so mindlessly that they didn’t realize that they had overstretched their own limits and that such “conquest” is ultimately unsustainable. In the real world, many a company is guilty of one of the 4 trajectories. Companies big or small inevitably fall for the “trap”. It is not that they deliberately walk into it rather they became so obsessed that they lost touch with reality or worst, they refused to accept reality thinking it only as a temporary fad or simply a glitch. And in the end, they pay the price of their hubris. However, such passionate pursuits aren’t really mistake. For it is in their pursuit that these companies attain their success but such passion should be tempered with practicality, prudence, and pragmatism. After all, the dough still comes from the customer and as the saying goes, “The Customer is Always Right…….”