Escape From Excellence

Most leaders, corporations, and high performance individuals pursue excellence. But Excellence is a sham, a dead end, a trap. It’s also the largest hidden cost in business (as well as in life). And discovering the Excellence Trap is my once-in-a-lifetime, “big moo,” huge, breakthrough idea. It’s been five years since I moved past the “what’s wrong with this picture” or “something smells fishy” phase of discovery and innovation to formalize my thinking about what’s ailing us and what must be the solution, and three years since I’ve been working with senior leaders and organizations to do something about it. And I now believe more than ever that discovering and escaping excellence in order to make the qualitative shift to mastery is right up there with the wheel, sliced bread, the internal combustion engine, flush toilets, and plugging in the guitar regarding its power to make our lives and work better and richer.

And I mean richer, because you can also make a lot of money with it; if the Excellence Trap is the largest hidden cost in business, then the Escape from Excellence to reach Leadership Mastery is the greatest source of competitive advantage I’ve ever encountered (and for twenty years it used to be my job to find and leverage competitive advantage via business and brand ideas). I’ll share all the details in this blog, but let’s start with how I discovered the Excellence Trap.

It’s simple, if you’re obsessive like me and just won’t settle for settling. But it took many years of pursuing and achieving excellence to figure this out. The big “a-ha” moment came when two observations, based on evidence, intersected and created the big charge of insight (it’s the same both with electricity and all innovation and creativity, no?).

Excellence Isn’t Working

The first observation was this: Excellence isn’t working. Like many of the people I knew, I’ve spent most of my life working to achieve excellence (that is, to excel), and reaping the rewards. Schools, employers, career moves, good habits, hard work, intelligence, action orientation, you get the picture. And I got to watch many, many others doing the same thing, up close and personal. It was (and is) clear: excellence sure beats failure or mediocrity. However, I also saw, everywhere I looked, many clear signs that excellence wasn’t paying off as promised. For example, even with responsibility and rewards, we see everywhere the struggle to sustain innovation and output, to get that extra 5%, to keep motivation and morale high, to communicate effectively, to keep it fun, to make a difference, to leave a legacy, to succeed, to find the zone, to keep the ideas coming.

Forget TV’s hilarious “The Office,” and step into even the most successful organizations to see people struggling with depletion, unsustainability, destructive politics, stress, turbo-tasking, groupthink, useless meetings, rare true innovation, burn out, lack of balance, marginal change, and incremental growth. And also notice the countless experts and programs trying to fix it.

Newsflash: it doesn’t work. Most attempts at a fix achieve merely marginal change and just perpetuate the problem. As one client put it, “I thought when I had a C in my title, I’d be living large.” Sure, big house, fat paycheck, exotic vacations, powerful influence based upon position power. But day to day this client had a knot in his stomach and struggled with constant pressure from above and below, trying to get ahead of the fires, and all the while trying to innovate and inspire his team. And his company was the undisputed industry leader! I estimate that one person in a million doesn’t share the same challenges. So let’s get this straight: talented people + hard work + superb credential + great experience + experts = what? The marginal and incremental nonsense we see almost everywhere and everyday? Excellence still leaves a lot to be desired. As we’ll see, from the perspective of mastery, excellence is mediocrity with nicer shoes.

Excellence is the Enemy

The second big insight is this: Failure and mediocrity are the easy targets; excellence is the real enemy. I’ve closely studied the world’s great wisdom traditions, from every angle, for thirty years (I guess that makes me a leadership guru! Maybe it’s time to shave my head?). Here’s what they all say: the real enemy is excellence, and every major wisdom tradition the world over, from philosophy, to religion, to psychology, to folk wisdom, have at their core a message as well as a method, that goes to the heart of the matter: there is a qualitative shift we have to make that takes us to the next level. Any when we do, we experience exponential increases in all we care about.

It’s not about more work, more experience, more skill, more knowledge, greater luck, more drive, better advice, wiser counsel, or more perspective. It’s about something greater: a leap past fear, ego, white noise, and external agendas in order to identify and embrace who we, our teams, our organizations, our brands, and our markets are uniquely, what makes us jump out of bed in the morning, what we have that no one else has, and how we can bring it to everything we do. It works for leaders, but also for teams, organizations, enterprises, and even brands and markets. Without it, we’re just paying someone else’s mortgage and marking time. We’re going through the motions, chasing our tail, relying on effort, cleverness, and bluster, while minimizing or denying the costs. Or worse, and as we’ll see, we’re applying the virtues of excellence beyond their built-in limits, and hitting a wall.

Once we see excellence for what it is, a trap, we want a way out. Even if we seem to be doing well vs. failures and mediocrities, we now know better. Mastery will take us much farther, and with far less difficulty and far less damage. Simple words, but a profound shift. Very few get past excellence, and those that do so are likely to be famous, legendary, and often rich, whatever their walk of life or field of endeavor. Conversely, a leader trapped in excellence is just a technocrat or “manager” with a nicer office. And that won’t do.

The big idea is this: Excellence is a trap. It extracts a high price that adds up to nothing less than the largest hidden cost in business.

And this: Excellence has built-in limits that get worse over time, so the more excellent we get, the more we pay the price.

And this: you can’t escape excellence by being more excellent. You must escape it.

But here’s the good news: I’ve got excellence’s number. I know, specifically and in detail how it works, how it falters, how it entraps. And I know what to do about it, and how to get past it. So I’ll see you next time. Preview: it’s called Leadership Mastery. And it changes everything.

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