LEADERSHIP

62 • LEADERSHIP
possible, and then quickly move on to the next opportunity or
challenge. I realize that in many endeavors—art, science, medicine
and the like—my strategic approach may not be appropriate.
But in competitive business environments—or in any
other organization with limited resources, a sense of urgency,
and imperatives pending attention—ignore your mother’s advice.
“Always do your best work” isn’t always the best strategy.
The competition doesn’t care a whit about making your mom
happy or seeing A’s on your report card. You are a highperformance
achiever, and if you want to achieve more, you
have to be economical with how you spend your limited energy,
time, and resources.
My advice is, “Get the project done and move on to the
next as quickly as possible!” I want to see results—lots of results.
I suggest that you focus on achieving imperatives and
essentials quickly, rather than slowing to refine and polish.
Spend your time on accomplishing a bucketful of got-tohaves,
rather than on a handful of nice-to-haves. Don’t get me
wrong. I’m not saying do shoddy work. Far from it! I’m saying
don’t let yourself, or your team, get sucked into the “we-canmake-this-better”
helix to ... I better stop in case Mom reads
this. High-performance achievers prefer success over perfection.
Said another way, your mother is wrong—mediocrity is your
friend because perfection sucks the life out of progress. Don’t ignore,
and don’t let your sidekicks ignore, the highperformance-achievement
strategy: good enough is better than
best.
So how good is good enough? The answer is clarified when
we replace “Is this our best work?” with "Is this fit for purpose?” If
you want to be a high-performance achiever, make all your
work fit for purpose, as rapidly as possible, and then move on.