One-minute excellence
From xoa
This is the foreword to Tom Peters' book The Pursuit of Wow, but it also ran in his newspaper column. I clipped it and had it on my fridge for years.
One-minute excellence. I can sense the curling of your lips. While such a catchphrase makes me shudder, too, it contains a gem waiting to be discovered.
How do you go on an effective diet? How do you stop smoking? How do you stop drinking?
In short, you do it and it's done. Then you work like hell for the rest of your life to stay on the weight-maintenance, nonsmoking, or booze-free wagon.
A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.
The idea is profound.
Suppose you're a waiter and, for your own future's sake (not because of pressure from the clowns who run the restaurant), you decide to set a matchless standard for service. How? You do it. Now.
Sure, you'll be clumsy at first. You'll get a lot of it wrong. You'll need to read up, listen to audio-tapes, take classes, tune in to on-line electronic chat rooms, visit other restaurants to collect clues. And you'll need to keep doing such things to maintain your edge (as an opera singer or professional athlete does) until the day you hang up your corkscrew.
Nonetheless, you can become excellent in a nanosecond, starting with your first guest tonight. Simply picture yourself, even if it's a very fuzzy picture, as the greatest waiter ever—and start acting accordingly. Put yourself in lights on Broadway, as a galaxy-class waiter; then perform your script with derring-do.
Does it sound wild? Silly? Naive? Maybe, but it isn't. The first 99.9 percent of getting from here to there is the determination to do it and not to compromise, no matter what sort of roadblocks those around you (including peers) erect.
The last 99.9 percent (I know it adds up to more than 100 percent—that's life) is working like the devil to (1) keep your spirits up through the inevitable storms, (2) learn something new every day, and (3) practice that something, awkward or not and no matter what, until it's become part of your nature.
What holds for the waiter also holds for the manager of the six-person department or the chief executive of the 16,000-person firm.
How long does it take you, as boss, to achieve world-class quality? Less than a nanosecond to attain it, a lifetime of passionate pursuit to maintain it.
Once the fire is lit, assume you've arrived—and never, ever look back or do anything, no matter how trivial, that's inconsistent with your newfound quality persona.
Suppose you commit to achieving new heights in quality or service here and now. In your own mind, you're an instant Nordstrom (retail) or Motorola (manufacturing). But your next task—dad-blamed real world—is to go through your boring in-basket.
What an opportunity! Respond to the first item that turns up as you imagine a Nordstrom or Motorola exec would.
A memo from a frontline worker complaining about a silly impediment to improvement? A request to change office-supply vendors? An irate note from a customer or distributor? "Nordstrom" it. "Motorola" it. Act out, in a small way, your Nordstrom-Motorola fantasy of matchless quality.
Sure, if you keep it up for even a few hours, people all over the organization will start looking at you oddly. You want them to, because you've achieved your first tiny victory. You, Ms. Planet-class Quality, are living a new life. Their misfortune is that they haven't figured it out for themselves yet.
Does all this amount to a quarter-baked pep talk better delivered under a revival tent? Hardly. (And if you don't believe me, ask a friend in Alcoholics Anonymous, perhaps the most effective change program on earth today.) You see, the deeper point is that you'll either change in a nanosecond—or never. It's true with booze, smokes, fat, and world-class quality. The determined shift of mind-set is an all-or-nothing deal.
In case you can't tell, I'm fed up to my eyebrows with execs (and folks of every other rank) who talk about how l-o-n-g it takes to achieve change. That's pure rubbish. It takes forever to maintain change ("One day at a time," according to AA); but it takes just a flash to achieve change of even the most profound sort.
One morning in Houston almost six years ago, I changed. I was a nonexerciser. But that day, for a lot of not very significant reasons, I went out at 5 A.M. and took my first, bumbling speed walk. Eleven minutes later (OK, more than a few nanoseconds), I was hooked. True, every day since then I've fretted that I'll renege. Exercise is a lifetime pursuit, which causes pain some days (e.g., as I write, it's unseasonably cold, rainy, and getting late). But as of that morning, I was a no-baloney, world-class, rudely dogmatic exerciser.
Change is that simple. Honest.
