Balancing Speed and Excellence

There are three types of excellence: Slow Excellence, Fast Excellence, and True Excellence.

With Slow Excellence, you obtain a very high quality product or service but it takes time. In some cases, the delay makes the added quality that was produced by the additional production time irrelevant. You would have preferred a product or service that had less quality but which was faster.

You can find that with Fast Excellence, where you obtain a very high quality product or service but, as with its counterpart, its quality has been shaped by speed. In other words, it is extremely good given the speed at which it was produced. It may well have been better, perhaps even much better, had more time been available but you can't afford additional time.

With True Excellence, you quickly get a product or service that would be extraordinary under any known circumstances. Additional time would not have mattered. The performance is, until an innovation arises, as good as it gets.

Part of our work involves determining what manner of excellence is desired, when quality and speed countermand one another, and whether anything resembling excellence is desired.