Escape From Excellence

In my late youth, when it seemed that I prefered reading heavy European books instead of frolicking outside in the sunshine, I once read where Soren Kierkegaard (big deal Danish philosopher) railed against the faults of what he called “the busy man of affairs,” by whom he meant movers and shakers in business and politics. He seemed to think they were all vacant and shallow phonies who stroked their own egos while achieving nothing of value (in his view, the Copenhagen of his day was one big fat bourgeois nightmare). Well, OK, that can be true sometimes, especially when mediocrity dresses up as excellence. But it never rang entirely true to me. Kierkegaard was a giant in many ways, but he wasn’t the most well-adjusted fellow, and even his fans often have to shake their heads sometimes at his emotional foibles (he died of exhaustion and a broken heart after he lost a battle, that he started, in which he attacked, well, basically everybody in town, in print).

Many years later, I learned that Hindu’s believe that all work is good, and necessary. Great news! Take that Kierkegaard! It turns out that burgermeisters and industrialists are people too. The problem is that while it may be all well and good to do the work of a merchant (business person), you have little chance in traditional Indian society to reinvent yourself or escape the mere excellence of your caste of birth. You have to be born a brahmin.

So I wondered (as I do): can there be a business brahmin? Can one be fully integrated and at their best, as a business leader? Short answer: Yes. But you have to escape from the mediocrity and excellence that Kierkegaard so despised, and make the transition to mastery. Then, as Joseph Campbell pointed out, there is nothing in this world more powerful and unstoppable than a fully realized brahmin. Then business isn’t busyness. It has become innovation, creativity, and vision made real for the substantive benefit of all involved. Leadership Mastery is like that.

Let’s talk about the crucial idea of the Falling Point. This is where the rubber meets the road, or really more like where the poop hits the fan. This explains just how and when the Excellence Trap gets us.

When we surpass the built-in limit of any of the Virtues of Excellence, which inevitably occurs, we reach the Falling Point. When this happens, our lifelong upward arc gradually takes a new direction, and at first we don’t even notice. This is the great irony of being excellent; eventually it bites us, and we don’t know why. But, like a subatomic particle or distant star, we can’t see it directly; we can only “see” it by its effects.

These effects include all the costs and challenges that we observe confronting those hardworking, well- intentioned, capable, successful, and excellent people we mentioned earlier: struggling to achieve the extra 5%, sustain peak performance and innovation, while confronting merely incremental change, marginal outcomes, limited advantage, and inconsistent inspiration, focus, and alignment with values and goals.

The Falling Point is sort of like the point of diminishing returns, except that it is really more like the point of incurring and accruing hidden and unnecessary costs. Big difference.

The moment we reach the Falling Point, on any one of the Virtues, the Corruptions of Excellence set in and the Costs of Excellence come racing behind. This explains why good people aren’t enjoying a life of mastery. And this is precisely what forces the choice between 1. falling back into mediocrity or 2. ascending to mastery, if you’re even fortunate enough to make the choice; most driven people just stick it out in excellence, not knowing what hit them, until the costs become too high. In the meantime, they ride the roller coaster, play the odds, and try to beat the clock, all the while wasting time with the Five Failed Strategies of Excellence.

But take heart, every master was there once. Then they escaped from excellence.

 Remeber this: We don’t cross the Falling Point because we have failed in any way. Quite the opposite. We only cross it if we are excellent! And that is how excellence traps us, every time.

Everybody is replaceable, right? Well, 99% of the time this is true, even when talking about successful, excellent leaders. But this weekend, in episode four of the series John Adams on HBO, I watched with interest as Thomas Jefferson corrected Ben Franklin by telling him that he could never replace Franklin as US Representative in Paris, but could only succeed him. Putting Jefferson’s own future achievements aside, this one line speaks volumes: masters can never be replaced, only succeeded. The goal of any master is to be succeeded by another master. And each master is unique. Jefferson at once recognized Franklin’s mastery, and made an implicit claim for his own!

But excellence is replaceable. Always. Because excellence is based on things like skill and effort, however advanced, it is replicable. In this way, “succession planning” may be a useful nicety to spare our feelings, it is a misnomer. It should be called replacement planning. That sounds bad, but it tells a difficult truth. If you are excellent, whether you’re the crack new recuit or the successful CEO, you are replaceable. And of course, that is good for the ongoing health of the excellent business. If excellence were good enough (it isn’t).

But masters leave a different legacy. Masters can only be succeeded. If they are succeeded by another master, all will be well. If not, the company throws the dice and hopes for the best, dealing with excellence, mediocrity, and failure over time and in turn. But in great mastery traditions, unlike business, for example in martial arts, music or comedy improvization, and monastic Buddhism, and probably in symphony conducting, there is a process of identification, initiation, and development into mastery, beyond excellence (you already have to be excellent even to be considered). In these places, mastery is planned and demanded. No mastery, no mantle.

But most so-called corporate “succession planning” only deepens the excellence, and the excellence trap, of the candidate for leadership; and in this it often succeeds. Unfortunately, the excellent leader then spends his or her time in leadership dealing with the limits and costs of excellence (read all about them here). 

We need Mastery Planning. A leader must work to develop mastery before taking the helm, or as quickly as possible thereafter. And the bench must include other masters in training, while the entire organization develops a culture of mastery, not just of success. Band-aids like “Lessons from Company X” pale in comparison to what would happen if a leader (and everyone else) learned and applied the lessons of a genuine mastery tradition. That would be something! This could be approximated by appropriating the methods of the various mastery traditions. But in practice this is usually a force fit when applied to business, and often fights with business. Business needs it own mastery; business needs to become a mastery tradition in it’s own right! A better way may be to check out what we’ve created, specifically for business, here.

I recently spoke with the members of the senior management team of a global industry leader, all of whom described the team, each other, and even themselves, as all but paralyzed by fear. The fear of being called out by the CEO, criticized by the CEO, thrown under the bus by the CEO (or each other), of making alliances, of taking a stand, of not knowing something, of the person below them who wants their job. As with any senior management team at a successful company, this is a group of highly accomplished, well compensated, confident players with strong personalities and a take-the-hill mindset, individually and collectively. So what the hell is going on? Labeling the CEO a tyrant is most likely true, but it’s a cop out. Why? Because masters have no fear. If there was ever a group of people trapped in excellence and back-sliding into mediocrity and failure, this was it.

We are all hardwired for fear, as a way to protect ourselves. This is good. But in a business setting, strategic acumen is too often replaced by crippling fear. Not good. Let’s take a look at fear from the perspectives of failure, mediocrity, excellence, and mastery. Only mastery has no fear.

For the failure, fear takes over. The fear of a failure is terror. Terror paralyzes us into inaction, and defeats us. We become weak in the face of fear, choosing a flight response. The actions we do take are desperate, leading nowhere. Metaphor: the Deer, frozen in the headlights.

For the mediocre, fear manifests in swagger or bravado, which only denies fear and overcompensates with a fight response. The mediocre person rallies themself and blusters their way into a fight. Their actions are misguided and wasteful. They are aggressive and mercurial, and at times violent. But it is only themselves they are hurting. Metaphor: the Stinging Bee.

In the excellence trap, we see bravado evolve into bravery. Bravery is good insofar as it draws upon our internal character to find the strength to face fear. Excellent people do what they have to do, despite fear, and they work hard to do it well. Metaphor: the Adventurer. The problem is that they are still in fear, and fear takes a toll. No person functions at a peak level in fear, whteher they face it or not. No leader innovates, makes wise decisions, and holds a vision at a masterful level when in fear. They can only hope to maintain or, at best, grow just a little. Any it appears that many excellent leaders are in fear much of the time.

In mastery, the leader has no fear. He or she doesn’t give in to it, attack it, or even face it; they simply don’t have it! A leadership master reframes fear as an illusion and rejects it. Everyone else around them is either shaking in their boots, lashing out, or living with a knot in their stomach, but not the master. He or she replaces all this fear with trust: in themselves, their resources, other people and their ability to work with the best in people, and in life itself. This is not a naive trust, but rather a wise equinimity or unflappability in the face of challenges or imagined dangers. Masters know that fear is a con. Metaphor: the Acrobat. They use all that the absence of fear leaves them with to soar high, dazzle, and inspire.

So when a wise sage says, “Have no fear,” they mean exactly that! They didn’t say “Be brave,” as admirable as that is. Instead, they called us to change the game.

So I ask the terrified and terrorized managers: what’s worse? getting your ass handed to you by a tyrant, or losing your mojo? Being embarrased, and maybe even punished, or sacrificing the best of you on the alter of  mediocrity and failure, at best pushing the boulder uphill while stuck in the excellence trap? ”Hey, I want to keep my job and get promoted so I can be good to my kids” some of them might protest. Give me a break! No kid wants or needs a compromised and fearful zombie dressed up as an exec for a parent. And no wise CEO will promote one. No, better to work toward mastery, so fear simply goes away. Masters ALWAYS flourish. And a group of Masters in one place is unstoppable. I recommend that this management team work to that goal, and I work with all of my clients to exactly that goal. I must say, maybe the CEO isn’t a tyrant. Perhaps he is challenging them to get past fear, however clumsily (Hmm..can there be a zen tyrant? Probably).

Here’s an exercise. Try this at home, or during a commute or trip. Make an inventory of everything you have decided in the past day, week, month, year, decade, or lifetime (focus only on bigger decisions as the timeframe expands). Be brutally honest, and then put each decision into one of two columns. Column one represents the House of Fear, and column two is the House of Faith (or Trust). Bluster and bravado will only screw it up, so put that aside if it shows up. And bravery, while excellent and admirable, carries a cost. Be honest.  Do any decisions seem masterful, truly fearless? Put them in the House of Faith column. Let’s work for more of that!

We’ve all experienced the joy of watching a young child develop a passion. We see them bonding with one particular toy, banging on a drum without ceasing, dressing up like their hero, playing air guitar, or appearing to be glued to a tennis racket or baseball mitt. Eventually, one parent says, “For Pete’s sake, sign that kid up for some lessons!” Soon after, and usally as a card is about to be swiped, the “discipline talk” happens: “Well junior, (insert hero’s name here) had to work to get where they are. It’s wonderful that you love it, but it takes hard work, mastery of the fundamentals, practice, and discipline.” If the passion is real, the youngster takes this crucial advice to heart and begins the long journey to excellence.

Ah, but once inside excellence, as an adult, the relationship between discipline and passion is reversed. We’ve got the discipline, but passion can be in short supply, particularly when “vocation” and “career” are rarely the same thing. Think about it: We are surrounded by disciplined people who hold both themselves and others accountable to high standards and to an admirable work ethic. And the occasional junior or middle manager will even make quite a show of saying, “I have a passion for (insert business category here). ” But who really believes it? Ninety nine percent of the time it’s a put on, a crock, BS on toast. It fools no one, except maybe them. Many people trapped in excellence, meaning most of us, can say “I love my job” but then fantasize about exit strategies, seek compensatory rewards, and play the lottery anyway!

No, in business, we are mistaken if we assume that we and our people generate and sustain passion by looking forward to our paycheck, benefits, perks, prestige, and even our generalized passion for winning. That’s the Excellence Trap in action. Passion has to come from somewhere deeper, and Leadership Mastery unleashes it. A leader in mastery will overcome the narrow and shallow focus on discipline (and effort, skill, etc), to realize that the true driver of greatness for a leader, a team, and an entire enterprise, is the kind of passion that comes from the gut, the core, the soul. And this from each person, from the culture, and even from the market and the brands. As senior leaders, we need to connect with that passion, and help others to do the same. Otherwise, leadership mastery, enterprise mastery, and market mastery will elude us, and we will struggle for marginal advantage inside the Excellence Trap. So here’s to passion, and to profits. And here’s to finding both!

Daniel Plainview, the character brought to life in a staggering performance by Daniel Day Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s celebrated new film, There Will be Blood, is an outsized character of mythic proportion. So, while we are unlikely to meet someone like Plainview in real life, he presents a lesson, example, archetype, or “plain view” that speaks to all of us. I saw the movie recently, at the precise moment when I was searching for an easy way to communicate what the Excellence Trap is like, and how we come to be ensnared in it. Enter Daniel Plainview.

Daniel Plainview fancies himself a leader, a self-made man who will create something huge, create jobs, make history, and maybe even start a movement. When we first meet him, prospecting for oil, he embodies the Five Virtues of Excellence: Effort, Proficiency, Commitment, Expertise, and Acumen. He displays vision, tenacity, a willingness to take risks, and an admirable individualism and determination. Failure and mediocrity are simply not on his radar. At first, I like this guy, until he opens his mouth, 15-20 minutes into the movie, and we meet the monster he will become. While most people trapped in excellence are in no way monstrous like Plainview, he does show us, on a grand and mythic scale, what we are bound confront if we aloow ourselves to think that excellence is the end of the road. If we are excellent, we are unlikely to turn into the likes of Plainview, but we will confront the same dynamics, each in our own way. You can bank on that in the same way Plainview banks on himself and his oil.

Plainview’s problems set in when he reaches the Five Limits of Excellence, those built-in ceilings which undermine the positive aspects of excellence:

• His Effort is limited by his physical limits: he is merely a man and, to drive the point home, he is hobbled for life by an on-the-job injury. He reached this limit early on.
• His Proficiency won’t set him apart. He knows this, and so looks with seething rage upon anyone who has a measure of proficiency in his chosen profession of “Oilman,” from the executives of Standard Oil to, eventually, his own adopted son.
• His Commitment saps his strength, and in Plainview’s case, his soul as well. His mono-mania about success cuts him off from other people almost completely, he is often drunk or at the verge of rage, and he subjects himself and others to unnecessary hardships and dangers, far beyond any practical reasoning or benefit.
• His Expertise lacks vision. Early in the film, he appears possibly to have the makings of a visionary. But his ego, fear, greed, and paranoia cause him to miss opportunities or to see the larger picture. His isolation increases with each major episode in the film, as he manages to sucker people into his plans, but fails to attract anyone to a vision, because there is no vision to be seen.
• His Acumen reduces strategy to tactics. His obsession about competitive jockeying takes over his entire person, and he ends up bitter, alone, and un-admired (he calls his butler his “closest associate”). He has no allies, defenders, zealots, partners, and no lasting legacy other than violence, deceit, and hatred.

(more…)

Let’s stipulate that you, and most of the people you surround yourself with, can rightly be called excellent. As a basic definition, we’ll say that an excellent person is someone did or has had most of the following things:

• Good schools, good grades
• Good jobs
• Top companies
• Strong track record
• Powerful resume
• Significant responsibility
• Hard work
• Wise choices
• Terrific skills
• Commitment to success
• Good opportunities

Here’s the question: if this is so, then why is it that most of these same excellent people still struggle daily with a multitude of limits and a series of vexing challenges? These include sustaining productivity, consistently innovating, maximizing relationships, articulating a differentiating vision, leveraging competitive advantage, keeping it fun, and experiencing exponential increases in business outcomes and personal rewards. Add your own. Why do we settle for incremental change and marginal gains?

Is it just the way things are? Is it just the human condition? I say no! I say something is very wrong with this picture. We know that excellence isn’t enough, and we know that excellence, by its very nature, has built-in limits and unavoidable dynamics that actually contribute to the problem. That’s what makes it a trap. It’s like a Greek tragedy where the audience knows where this is leading, and it isn’t good. Well, the perspective of Mastery is like the audience. We see the trap that excellent people are in, but unlike a Greek audience, we can do something about it.

Here’s a bonus question: Is the entire industry devoted to maximizing success (including leadership development, management training, corporate shrinks, etc.) making a qualitative difference? Obviously not. The limits, challenges, and problems still exist, and the industry designed to help remains in place. Why aren’t the problems solved and the helpers out of business? We believe that it is because until now no one has understood how, why, and even that excellence is a trap, and no one has created a specific path out of the excellence trap and to mastery, specifically for leaders. We have, and we share all of our insights and knowledge about it on this blog. Look for our upcoming e-book, and if you want to access the tools that will help you, your team, and your enterprise make the change from excellence to mastery, you can visit us here.