The Myth of Excellence: Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything.The Myth of Excellence: Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything. By Fred Crawford Fred Crawford may refer to:
We've had a couple of decades' worth of books and speeches extolling the importance of excellence, with Tom Peters' and Robert Waterman's In Search of Excellence imprinting imprinting, acquisition of behavior in many animal species, in which, at a critical period early in life, the animals form strong and lasting attachments. Imprinting is important for normal social development. the idea on virtually every senior manager in America. Now come a pair of authors ready and willing to debunk de·bunk tr.v. de·bunked, de·bunk·ing, de·bunks To expose or ridicule the falseness, sham, or exaggerated claims of: debunk a supposed miracle drug. a bedrock tenet of corporate management. Crawford and Matthews argue that companies have gone overboard on the quest for Verb 1. quest for - go in search of or hunt for; "pursue a hobby" quest after, go after, pursue look for, search, seek - try to locate or discover, or try to establish the existence of; "The police are searching for clues"; "They are searching for the excellence, especially its notion that a corporation should seek to be great at everything it does. In striving for that goal, they write, companies attach too much value to things that should matter less. "The predictable outcome is that the company ends up world-class at nothing: not well-differentiated and therefore not thought of by consumers at the moment of need," they write. Instead, they argue, companies should aim for dominance in one of five elements five elements, n.pl fire, water, earth, wood, and metal; in Chinese medicine, each of these five components is used to organize phenomena for use in clinical applications. Each of the elements corresponds to a specific function (i.e. of a transaction (price, product, service, access, experience), differentiating value in a second element, and being at an industry par on the other three. It's not necessary to make equal investments in all five -- and customers wouldn't want them to, they say. Using examples from high-profile companies (Southwest Airlines This article is about the American airline. For the former Japanese airline, see Japan Transocean Air. For the British airline, see Air Southwest. Southwest Airlines Co. ) and little-known ones (Michigan music store Record Time, Irish supermarket SuperQuinn), The Myth of Excellence skillfully builds its case that "good is sometimes good enough." It's an arresting message, and a powerful book. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion