Escape From Excellence

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.

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We can get a good picture of the Excellence Trap by considering a story that a friend of mine recently shared. Like being trapped in excellence, it’s an experience that many of us will recognize. After spending five days bouncing around the country at 36,000 feet, touching down in various locations for sundry meetings, he approached the gate for his final flight of the week (his seventh), and quickly decided he had earned a bit of comfort. His ticket was in coach, and the flight was only a few hours long, but seeing the Friday afternoon crowd, feeling ragged, and very much looking forward to getting back to his nice new home, he got in line at the check-in desk, eventually reaching the gate attendant, and asked for an upgrade to first class, intending to redeem some frequent flyer miles. “I’m sorry,” the gate attendant said. “There are no first class seats available.” My friend was a bit taken aback, but quickly recovered. “Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “You don’t understand. I’m a member of the super-duper-constant-traveler-presidential-admiral’s club! This is one of my earned perks. Just look at my frequent flyer miles! So I’ll take my upgrade now please. Thanks.” “Very well, sir” replied the gate attendant. “There’s just one thing. Can you help me decide which of the other members of the super-duper-constant-traveler-presidential-admiral’s club now now waiting in the gate area, who have already checked in and upgraded, I should ask to be reassigned to coach?” My friend took his original seat.

Excellence is a lot like this. If you’re excellent, you’re a member of a club that is simultaneously elite and surprisingly crowded, and unless you look closely, these excellent folks all look sort of the same. After all, you’re not spending much time surrounded by mediocre performers. You’ve studied, achieved, and implemented what you knew would make you excel and succeed. And it did. So far, so good. But then, in the middle of living the excellent life, you look around and realize that a lot of other fine people received the same memo, that moving forward isn’t so easy, competitive advantage is harder and harder to come by, and big, sustainable, innovation and exponential growth start to seem like a memory, or a fantasy. It’s too bad but, like my excellent friend, reciting your credentials, kicking up a fuss, having to take no for an answer, lowering expectations, escaping into a nap, resigning to work during the flight in lieu of other options, putting on a stoic face, flashing the Rolex, or just demanding extra in-flight snacks all won’t cut it. You did all the right things your entire life, up to and including today, and now here you are stuffed into coach with a lot of excellent people in the same predicament. There has to be a better way. It was supposed to be better than this. And it can be: escape the Excellence Trap, change the game, and make the transition to Mastery. Mastery is like having that great seat waiting for you all the time. Either way, I hope this story helps you get a sense of how unacceptable and unworkable excellence can be.

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.