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The Paradox of
Excellence: How Great Performance Can Kill Your Business It’s something each one of us has faced. Often you find that the better you get at your job, the higher the bar for appraising you. While job definitions for two workers may be the same, it isn’t necessary that the super performer gets the just rewards at the end of the day. From jobs to service. If a service provider is giving you excellent service, you barely notice it. Take for instance, the electricity company. When the power fails, how often do you sit back to laud it for the times it has provided you a regular electricity supply? What you remember of it will be times that it has failed to provide it. The same principle applies to the IT, hospitality, travel and pretty much every field that we come in contact with in our everyday life. To stretch it even further: When you got out of the shower this morning, did you call the water company to thank them? How about when you turned on the morning news—did you call the TV station to tell them what a great job they are doing getting out the news on time? Or when you received your monthly pay cheque deposited straight into your bank. Did you call the bank to thank them? Or even your over-worked human resource department? Or if you work in advertising or public relations —do you always live in fear of a client’s call? After all, they only call when they are unhappy. These are precisely some of the paradoxes that the brilliantly argued book attempts to capture. It’s not your typical management book—which inevitably makes it a darn easy read. In fact, it takes less than half a day to read it all, possibly longer to register all its messages. Part of the charm lies in the narration of the tale. Throwing pretty much every managerial way of telling a story out of the window, authors David Mosby and Michael Weissman unravel their tale through a day in the life of a Vice-President in a fictitious logistics company. Using an engaging scenario to demonstrate all that can go wrong in a day when a shipment fails to arrive on time— never mind a long-standing business relationship. Building that up, they move on to building a practical model for building and maintaining high customer loyalty and brand value. The author’s argument is that great performance often results in customers focusing on the less relevant aspects of a company’s value. If not recognised and remedied correctly, the smallest of slip-ups can be devastating to any business or individual. This essentially means that the better you do your job, the more your performance becomes invisible—unless something goes wrong. Often, customers take performance for granted, creating expectations that are difficult to live up to. This book helps you identify the danger signs and shows you way to correct them by continuously reinforcing the individual and corporate values that help to distinguish your company. Now, dishing out over Rs 800 for advice like that might seem a tad expensive, so if you’d like to go free and easy with it, you can pick up some useful tips from the authors website, appropriately titled www.paradoxofexcellence.com |
