FC NOW: The Fast Company Weblog
January 26, 2006
Poor Perfection
"The enemy of 'good' is 'perfect.' When time is critical, you have to make intelligent compromises."
--O. Wayne Isom, professor, Weill Medical College, Cornell
From Fast Company's recently released book, The Rules of Business: 55 Essential Ideas to Help Smart People (and Organizations) Perform At Their Best
Posted by Kevin Ohannessian at January 26, 2006 5:29 PM | Category: book discussions |
6 Comments
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I recently ran across this quote which makes the same point in a bit more forceful manner.
"A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan next week" - George S. Patton
I added it to my email signature and it has generated quite a few comments. Seems like a lot of people feel like I do..."Just Do Something!"
Regards,
Chief Show Officer
I think this is a common idea, but it's really difficult when you're a stakeholder of a project. When you've poored weeks and weeks or months and months into a particular project you don't think that "Good" is exceptable. It needs to be perfect. It takes a lot of discipline and vision to allow "Good" to be good enough, and a road to "Perfect" (if that even really exists).
My quote: Don't succomb to paralysis by analysis.
I'm all for intelligent compromises. But we often don't know what we don't know and in a business setting that often means legal risks often discounted before managers even know what they are. Those kind of "intelligent" compromises are a recipe for disaster. You don't need perfection, but you do need to make sure all of the key bases are covered before you can begin to know what you can afford to compromise.
Intelligent compromise is a fact of life. We can never have all the facts. what we can have is a sufficient amount of knowledge and then make an educated guess.
In business, at least my business, we have two types of unknowns: the knowable unknown and the unknowable unknown (Thanks Donald Rumsfeld!)
If we sit in our offices and analyze till our brains implode, we'll miss the opportunity. Conversely, if we just wing it, we'll also miss the opportunity. A balanced approach is needed.
We have a rule: Explain it in one page. If you can summarize your idea, notion or scheme in one page, execute. If you can't fill a page, back to the drawing board, or Google.
It works for us.
I agree with the Patton quote, and try to use a very simple "Assess - Plan - Do - Verify" process. You need all 4 to be successful!