Don McMinn

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. —John Gardner

Librettist and theatrical producer Oscar Hammerstein II once remarked on an aerial photo of the Statue of Liberty taken from a helicopter. He described how the photo revealed finely etched strands of hair atop the head of Lady Liberty, details placed there by Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi.

It’s important to remember that the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York Harbor on October 28, 1886, almost two decades before the Wright brothers’ first flight. In those days, no one believed that human beings would ever be able to fly over the statue and look down on the top of Lady Liberty’s head. Yet Bartholdi refused to cut corners with his sculpture. He paid attention to the little things, to the fine details he thought no one would ever see” (from Coach Wooden’s Greatest Secret by Williams and Robinson, pg. 119).

Pursuing excellence means always doing your best. But it also implies that your best will be better than the norm.

Here are some key factors in pursuing excellence.

• Pay attention to details. The pursuit of excellence will always involve an obsessive infatuation with details. Famous American designer Charles Eames said, “Details are not the details. They make the design.” Everything that exists is a compilation of details; pay attention to them.
• Take the time to get it right. Picasso used up no less than eight notebooks just for preliminary sketches of his revolutionary painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It takes a lot of time to fill eight notebooks with sketches but he wanted to get it right so the time he did take.
• Try to “do it once, do it right” but if the end product is inferior, be willing to “do it again to get it right.” Excellence can be obtained on the first attempt, but if it isn’t, be willing to stay with it.
• Embrace the concept of continuous improvement. In the 1960s and 1970s, W. Edwards Deming developed and introduced his quality-improvement methods into Japanese manufacturing. In two decades, Japanese products, which had been referred to as “Jap scrap,” became synonymous with “quality” and “super-engineering.” These quality improvement methods took Japan, within one generation, from a country that had been completely destroyed in 1945 to the number two economic power in the world. This transformation was built on the Japanese process called “kaizen” which means “continuous betterment” or “continuous improvement.” Never be content with the way things are; continually strive to make things better. Adopt the mindset that everything is a work in progress; incremental improvements will always be made.
• Be knowledgeable of benchmarks—they reveal how excellence is defined in any given area. Excellence is gauged by comparing an outcome with the generally accepted benchmark for that particular result. That’s why achieving excellence demands more than just doing the best we can do; our product must exceed standards that are established by others.
• Realize that excellence is an end unto itself. We should draw deep satisfaction from a job well done. Even if no one else notices or acknowledges our striving toward excellence, it will be its own reward. A job well done is very gratifying.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

Pursue excellence.

[reminder]What are your thoughts about this essay?[/reminder]

After returning to Earth from the first manned mission to the Moon, the Apollo 11 astronauts were required to comply with the rules of international (or in this case, interplanetary) travel. Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins had to go through customs at the Honolulu Airport.

The three astronauts went through the same process as any other travelers returning to the United States. They stood in line for customs and had to fill out the standard form listing what they brought back from their trip (moon rock and moon dust samples) their flight information (Apollo 11), and their route (Cape Kennedy, Florida to Honolulu, Hawaii, with a layover on the moon).

I am not making this up; it really happened.

Most often, rules and policies are developed either to standardize reoccurring events or to control misbehavior. I understand that, but sometimes rules need to yield to good sense and sound judgment.

The first time Mary and I visited Copenhagen, Denmark, we were finishing a 12-day cruise of the Baltic states. We disembarked the ship at 7:30 a.m. and went directly to the hotel where we would stay for the next two nights. We were told that there were no rooms available because they were being cleaned. Okay, that’s reasonable. We would wait in the lobby for the first available room.

Several hours later I inquired again and got the same answer, “The rooms have not been cleaned.”

Several hours later I walked through the hotel and discovered that most of the rooms were now cleaned and ready. When I mentioned that to the desk-clerk, he said, “Check-in is at three p.m.” “But the rooms are ready now,” I implored. His set-in-concrete reply was, “Check-in is at three p.m.”

Argh! We waited eight hours in the lobby and were finally given the key to a room at…3:00 p.m. (We would have toured the city during the time we were waiting for a room but it was a national holiday and everything was closed.) The hotel’s not-well-thought-out but strictly enforced policy created unnecessary inconvenience for its clientele.

View rules as guidelines, not as commandments carved in stone brought down from Mt. Sinai. Make exceptions to rules when commonsense requires it.

[reminder]What are your thoughts about this essay?[/reminder]

If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less. – General Shinseki

On August 5, 1949, 15 young smokejumpers parachuted into a gulch along the Missouri River in Montana to fight a wildfire. Unexpected high winds caused the fire to suddenly expand, cutting off the men’s route and forcing them back uphill. During the next few minutes, a “blow-up” of the fire covered 3,000 acres in ten minutes. The men panicked and ran up a 76 percent grade trying to make it to the other side of the crest. Twelve of the men died 56 minutes after they landed.

There are two things the firefighters could have done differently that would have, most likely, saved their lives. But these two things were contrary to all that they had been taught and they just couldn’t make the change.

Because the men were, literally, running for their lives, foreman Wagner Dodge ordered them to drop their backpacks and heavy fire-fighting equipment (pulaskis, shovels, and crosscut saws). To his amazement, many of the men refused his order; to them, their tools were essential to their safety and success. But at this point in the event, their tools were useless and the extra weight simply slowed them down.

Dodge quickly surmised that they would not be able to outrun the fire, so he did something that had never been done before. He invented, on the spot, what would later be called an escape fire. He took out his matches and set fire to the ground-cover where they were. After it burned, he lay down on the charred remains and told his men to do the same. Again, his men refused to follow suit—why would someone start a fire in the face of an inferno? Squad leader William Hellman said, “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here.” The rest of the team raced on past Dodge up the side of the slope, and all died. Dodge survived because when the wall of fire swept over his position there was no fuel for the fire so it went around him.

Sometimes what got you to where you are might not get you to where you need to be.

Here are two examples of how flexibility and a willingness to change saved two companies.

• Although it is one of the best-known electronics brands in the world today, Samsung began in 1938 as a company selling dried fish in South Korea. Stockholders are happy they made the change.
• When Nokia started in 1865, it was a wood pulp mill. Later, they made rubber boots. By 1998, Nokia had become the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, a position it held until 2012. With the popularity of the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy, I hope Nokia is looking for their next major change.

Take an inventory of your life and practices. Are you tenaciously clinging to dried fish, rubber boots, or pulaskis? Are your approaches no longer effective?

[reminder]What are your thoughts about this essay?[/reminder]

Experience is not the best teacher; evaluated experience is.—John Maxwell

Learn from your successes.

Do we learn more from studying failures or successes? Obviously, we learn from both, but often we analyze our failures and merely celebrate our successes. But the most valuable lessons may come from studying our successes. Here’s why.

You cannot infer success by studying failure and then inverting it. Of all the different ways to perform a certain task, most of them are wrong. Failure reveals what does not work, but it will not tell what does work. That’s why you cannot learn much by studying failure.

Carefully analyze successes because it is often difficult to determine exactly why something was successful; a cause and effect relationship is hard to establish. For instance, was the workshop you sponsored well-attended because of the topic, the speakers, or because it was held in the Caribbean? When you succeed, create hypotheses about why it may have happened and test them to confirm accurate correlations.

Also, carefully reflect on your early successes because they may mislead you. Po Bronson says, “Failure is hard but success can be far more dangerous. If you’re successful in the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever.”

Learn from your failures.

View failures and mistakes as both unavoidable and acceptable. Management consultants Pfeffer and Sutton say, “Setbacks and mistakes should be viewed as an inevitable, even desirable, part of being action oriented. The only true failure is to stop trying new things and to stop learning from the last effort to turn knowledge into action.”

If we are afraid of failure, we will never move beyond our safe zone; we will never leave sight of the shoreline for the vast ocean. Instead of thinking, “failure is not an option,” think “failure is an option, and there’s a good probability that it will happen.”

When you fail, look for causes, not excuses. Analyze what happened, identify causes, learn, and adjust.

Although failure is a natural byproduct of living an aggressive life, never be cavalier about failure and don’t romanticize it. Failure is not acceptable if it is the result of slothfulness, poor planning, or poor execution.

Are you failing enough?

In 1952, Drs. Watson and Crick discovered DNA. Dr. Watson calmly proclaimed, “I have discovered the source of life.” Their findings were published in an 874-word paper. Years later, Dr. Crick acknowledged that some of his postulations were off-beat and speculative. “But,” he told the Associated Press in 1994, “a man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.”

Picasso used up no less than eight notebooks just for preliminary sketches of his revolutionary painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, before he was satisfied.

Thomas Edison, when commenting on his experiments to invent the light bulb, said, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Winston Churchill said, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

Don’t miss out on what you can learn from successes and failures.

[reminder]What are thoughts about this essay?[/reminder]