Good Enough Never Is

Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

– William Faulkner

This post is a follow-up to the previous Built to Last post. In this one, I am going to record and share some learnings from this fantastic book.

According to the authors, one of the main differentiators between visionary and comparison companies is the fact that the visionary companies are embracing the “Genius of the AND”:

• Continuity AND Change
• Core Values AND Big Hairy Audacious Goals
• Stability AND Discontinuity
• Cult-like Cultures AND Idiosyncratic People
• Consistency AND Innovation
• Discipline AND Creativity
• Systematic Methods AND Experimental Approaches
• Meaning AND Achievement
• Preserve the Core AND Stimulate Progress

So, how do you preserve the core and stimulate progress at the same time? The authors suggest that there are five critical components to it that were seen across the visionary companies, which, in the words of the book authors, are:

• Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs): Commitment to challenging, audacious – and often risky – goals and projects toward which a visionary company channels its efforts (stimulates progress).
• Cult-like Cultures: Great places to work only for those who buy in to the core ideology; those who don’t fit with the ideology are ejected like a virus (preserves the core).
• Try a Lot of Stuff and Keep What Works: High levels of action and experimentation – often unplanned and undirected – that produce new and unexpected paths of progress and enable visionary companies to mimic the biological evolution of species (stimulates progress).
• Home-grown Management: Promotion from within, bringing to senior levels only those who’ve spent significant time steeped in the core ideology of the company (preserves the core).
• Good Enough Never Is: A continual process of relentless self-improvement with the aim of doing better and better, forever into the future (stimulates progress).

All of this makes a ton of sense: a visionary company becomes visionary by achieving great things and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. This is only doable by embracing the “Genius of the AND.” Doing this is hard. To do this, the company has to put in a lot of effort, which is hard enough on its own and could be impossible without a true alignment within the company. This is what preserving the core unlocks: it allows the company to focus on its goals and avoid wasting effort on misaligned actions. Alignment also gives people within the company more freedom, including the freedom to innovate and experiment, which is crucial for progress. Then, when the company has alignment and freedom to innovate, it has to ensure that it has bold and inspiring goals, which help with both alignment and stimulating progress. And finally, it’s crucial to ensure that the company has a culture and processes that help it to keep improving and never settle for “good enough.”

There is one more essential thing that I want to mention. When applying these learnings and instilling these principles into the company, people doing this should avoid pushing these principles directly themselves. Instead, they should be building processes to instill the principles. Processes that will continue working and moving the company forward even after the people who built them are gone. As the authors put it: “Be a clock builder – an architect – not a time teller.”

Hopefully, this post gave you a better understanding of the findings presented in the “Built to Last” book. If you want more details, I highly recommend reading the book itself. It’s a great read.