Escape From Excellence

When the Limits of Excellence are reached, the Virtues of Excellence are transformed into these corruptions. Please remember, they aren’t crimes or “sins;” they aren’t corruptions in that sense. We call them corruptions because, by definition, they take something good (the Five Virtues of Excellence) and dilute it and transform it into something unhealthy and harmful. So when we cross the Falling Point and the corruptions set in, we are guilty of nothing more than pushing ourselves to be excellent. And that’s something to be proud of. The problem is that this is precisely how excellence traps us and holds us back. Here they are:
Entropy
Entropy occurs when the physical and mental limits of Effort are surpassed. It signals a breakdown of the system. This system can refer to a person, a team, or an entire enterprise. So an excellent person, giving his or her all, eventually hit a wall when there’s no more effort to give. Hello Entropy.

Technocracy
Proficiency is merely a cost-of-entry, and it’s the same for everyone. So, when we rely upon proficiency beyond its limit, asking it to somehow differentiate us or drive truly great achievement, we’ve asked it to do what it can’t do. Excellent proficiency may look amazing to a novice, but masters know it’s never the end all. When we make it our focus, it can lead to a cult of capability, or Technocracy. We see this in the athlete who has no grace, the musician who has no taste, the prose stylist who has no ideas. They are like circus performers, and are soon forgotten.

Fixation
Fixation happens when the limits of healthy Commitment are surpassed. Eventually, our priorities, strategies, and organizations become misaligned. We’ve all seen fixated people who like to think they are committed. They mean well, but they have lost the plot. Perhaps they should be committed?

Rigidity
When Expertise is asked to have a vision, which it lacks by definition, Rigidity sets in. Then what we think we know supplants what we actually see, and progress becomes marginal and incremental. We’ve all known people who are great at project or operations management, but lack “the vision thing.” When something doesn’t go the way they’d like, unless they have other resources, skills, and frameworks to draw upon, they often dig in their heels, becoming rigid. They confuse this with expertise, with an assist from commitment. Wrong. It’s ego, plain and simple. The virtue of excellence got corrupted into rigidity, and the cost to themselves, their team, and the enterprise is following right behind.

Cunning
Cunning occurs when the limits of Acumen are reached and strategy is reduced to self-serving tactics. Acumen has an attitude of openness and considers navigation to part of the strategic adventure of business and life. Cunning sets in when that attitude is lost, when facts, information, and the map grow fuzzy. Because nobody has perfect information at all times, cunning is always a temptation.

Excellence differs from failure and mediocrity most obviously because many people openly and passionately aspire to it. They want the satisfaction excellence brings and the rewards it promises. Excellent people simply have richer lives, get more done, and have more fun. Aspiring to excellence is valued, encouraged and rewarded. No one really says, “I aspire to mediocrity.” Or, “I’m comfortable with failure.” So, even though excellence eventually turns on us and leads us into to the Excellence Trap, it is nevertheless fitting to speak of those habits and practices which can lead us to excellence as virtues.

There is no shortage of advice and opinions about what drives excellence. After studying much of what’s out there, across time and across cultures, and after working with a myriad of clients, we’ve identified five core virtues which truly account for excellence, without reducing or narrowing what excellence actually is or what it requires. 

The Virtues of Excellence are these: effort, proficiency, expertise, commitment, and acumen. If you demonstrate those five consistently then you will achieve excellence. And you will be also well on your way to the Excellence Trap! Let’s discuss these five virtues one by one.

(more…)

What is it about business and words that start with the letter P? We all remember the 4P’s of marketing (I’ll spare you another recitation), and I seem to remember four new marketing P’s coming along several years back. Last week, in a flash of P-inspired insight, I discovered the Five P’s of Leadership. Check it out…

The formula looks like this: Passion + Peace = Purpose >> Prosperity + Profit. This means when a leader has moved past both drive and rest, to have both passion and peace, they will clarify and deepen their purpose, which in turn leads to greater prosperity and profits. This is based on the key insight that the often-overlooked both-and relationship between passion and peace is the key driver of results. If you understand and apply that, you will be closing in on leadership Mastery, and you will enjoy a competitive advantage vs. those who never figure this out.

Challenge: First, too many of us are driven by a passion that never gives us any real peace (probably because this passion comes from our old friends, fear and ego). Consider this: how many seriously driven people do you know who seem to be actually compensating for something, or trying to prove a point? Do they seem healthy and well? Are they effective? I suspect not. But second, often when we experience what we call “peace” (but is actually really merely “rest”), we soon get bored and need to get back in the arena and do something! This is because we’re meant to be creating and doing; it turns out that we’re bundles of energy after all. But nonetheless, so many folks dream of retirement, work for the weekend, crave some serious R&R, or just need to trance out for a few minutes.

Solution: Passion and Peace aren’t an either-or; they are a both-and! In excellence, drive and rest fight with each other, but in mastery, they become Passion and Peace. In mastery, doing what you love to do and do best, getting to come from your passion, is itself peace. So we can be in motion or at rest, but in mastery we are always passionate and always at peace, at the same time! So while managing recovery  and pacing how we expend energy are crucial (in this regard, I like what The Energy Project is doing), this is limited to managing merely our capacity when we’re still in the Excellence Trap. Leadership Mastery gets past all that and combines Peace and Passion to successfully focus on our identity and Purpose. This focused drive is qualitatively different from what we experience in the Excellence Trap. It leads directly to the fourth and fifth P: Prosperity (personal flousishing) and Profit (return on investment and return on inspiration).

Summary: Drive and rest fight with each other when we are trapped in excellence. In Leadership Mastery, drive changes into passion, and rest changes into peace. They now feed each other, and this results in exponential increases in all desired personal and business outcomes.

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.

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.

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.