Good is the enemy of great

The first two sentences of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins are:

Good is the enemy of great.

And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.

At some point I may write a blog about the book as a whole in some blog post, but today I’m just going to focus on those two sentences.  When I first read them, I had to put the book down and think about those two sentences before being able to move on.  I’ve encountered this in so many different ways.  Once one has achieved a certain level of competence, it’s difficult to continue to push boundaries in order to go beyond that.  Everyone has a different idea what is "great", though.  Is great creating the highest quality product possible?  Or is it finding the best balance between quality and cost?  To make matters more complicated, what we define as "great" will change as we are better able to provide services.  Before we can agree whether we have so little that becomes great, we must first define it.  Personally, I see greatness in people who can go beyond their typical job role and provide some extra benefit to their customers.  Take these examples:

A good developer gets the job done in a relatively short amount of time, and they are able to find most of their bugs in their testing process.  They understand and use programming best practices to avoid errors and help the next person viewing their code.  A great developer can find bugs just by looking at code, and errors found during testing come as a surprise.  They also understand when not to use a particular best practice if it does not apply to that particular situation.

A good designer can take a color palette and a set of business requirements and come up with a design that impresses users on first glance.  A great designer can understand the needs of the end user to create a design that is easy and natural to use both the first use and the thousandth use.

A good project manager can tell if a project is at risk of not meeting stakeholders’ expectations and can balance the needs between different groups involved, such as developers, designers, and stakeholders.  A great project manager can anticipate and mitigate problems before they arrive, as well as keep the entire team focused on what’s really important in a project.

A good business analyst takes business specifications and turns them into software specifications that the team can understand.  A great business analyst takes business requirements, creates a holistic business solution.  They then can create documentation for the software that supports this business solution.

So how is the good the enemy of great?  In all of the cases I’ve outlined above, not only can one can make a career out of being good, but some managers might think that striving for greatness detracts from the main problem at hand.  (My definitions of greatness involve going beyond traditional job roles, which might not be appreciated by no-nonsense, “get-it-done” type managers.)  Because most people can make a career out of being good, they limit themselves and never reach for true greatness.

Going beyond Collins' point, I would also argue that being good encourages complacency.  Continued complacency leads to adequacy.  Continued adequacy leads to stagnation.  In our ever-changing world, stagnation leads to mediocrity and worse.  It’s no coincidence that all of the companies Collins profiled achieved greatness by shaking up the status quo.  Don’t accept something that is merely good when you can strive for something great.  You may not reap the benefits today, but you will someday.