Not Bad Enough

Forget any quests or searches for excellence. Many workplaces operate on the benchmark of Not Bad Enough.

The Not Bad Enough standard means that no corrective action will be taken until disaster has struck or is minutes away. Earlier warnings are dismissed as alarmist or a waste of time and money. The line "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is frequently employed. Stories are told of times in the past when someone uttered a dire prediction and nothing bad transpired. Executives who can erupt in anger if a restaurant order is slightly late suddenly attain the patience of Buddhist monks.

Don't worry, they purr. It's not bad enough to merit that sort of strenuous response. The more open among them urge waiting for additional evidence.

Naturally, there are times when their words make sense. Specialists often see crises everywhere and a leadership group that listened to all of their predictions would either be paralyzed in fear or running off in all directions.

The Not Bad Enough advocates, however, are a different crew. They operate not from a rational resistance to alarms but from three perspectives. Some live in a fantasy world in which nothing terrible will take place because the organization is just so big and powerful that terrible events scurry away at its approach. Others are calculating careerists who figure that it is wiser to wait for irrefutable evidence of a problem - such as lawsuits or explosions - than to leap into a decision that might harm one's progress up the ladder. Still others may secretly welcome a crisis because it will be a break from their usual humdrum routine and will provide many opportunities for heroic action.

Those who seek to move this Not Bad Enough crowd will have to show:

1. The danger is real;


2. There is greater career damage and risk in delay than in action;


3. To take action now is heroic.
   

If those criteria are not addressed, then the odds of persuasion are remote. After all, things are bad enough.

Quote of the Day

From what we get, we can make a living. What we give, however, makes a life.

- Arthur Ashe

Benny Eggs and New York Rents

Jimmy Breslin writes a tribute to New York City. An excerpt:

It is these rents that affected the Genovese crime family, once the nation's biggest and most lethal Mafia outfit. For it was in the Village, famed for palette and pen, that the mob missed its first heartbeat. The organization flourishes in places where the poor live. In a sense, real estate prices more than the law did in the Mafia—and helped change the character of this part of New York.

Consider the story of mobster Benny Eggs. He was paying $200 a month for his ground-floor clubhouse at 101 Thompson Street. He assumed the landlord was satisfied. The landlord was satisfied—satisfied that one day the cops would catch up with Benny Eggs and the clubhouse would be ready to rent to some scarecrow woman designer from Milan for thousands. Each morning, the landlord thrilled at the headlines in the New York Daily News about Mafia arrests—delight that turned to despair when Benny Eggs was not among them.

Then came the headline he had been dreaming of: BENNY EGGS BUSTED. Soon there was a store on the ground floor of Number 101 that paid $3,500 and sold expensive Italian fashions.

Finding Time

We've all seen various time management schemes in which daily tasks are prioritized.

Most advocate the use of A, B, and C designations with "A's" being tasks that will be an embarrassment if left undone and then the other labels progressively dropping in importance.

Embarassment is not a bad standard, I suppose, but it is certainly not the only one and, as Stephen Covey has noted, sometimes greater attention should be given to those Not Urgent But Important tasks which may not mean much today but may make an enormous difference three or four years from now.

Some other ways to organize your day or week are less conventional. One approach is to focus on a particular theme - office organization, for example - and do things that advance that area. Another is to address commitments to people or institutions: "This morning will be limited to working on the Parks project and the afternoon will be dedicated to the Phillips account." Many of our greatest regrets in time management come when we have failed to keep commitments to others.

[One of the most common time management mistakes is using schedule books solely to chart meetings and not activities.]

The two key factors in any of these approaches involve deciding what is worthy of time and then focusing on the top two items. Ideally, you would focus solely on one priority but boredom and interruptions make it wise to have the top two in mind so if action on one is blocked, you can shift your attention to the other. Once one is completed, of course, a worthy replacement can be selected from the back bench.

In most cases, this will be done amid a certain amount of chaos. Indeed, the actual work is likely to be done in bursts and not in a continuous, organized, flow. Recognizing that hard truth acknowledges that all work days - except those of neurotics - have lag times and goof off points.

The challenge is to make sure that the "down times" don't predominate and that the "focus times" are given meaningful amounts of time and attention.

Quote of the Day

Learn to say no. It will be of more use to you than to be able to read Latin.

- Charles Spurgeon

Ledeen on Iran

Check out BookTV's program on Michael Ledeen's new book, The Iranian Time Bomb.

Work Ethic Update

One of the last things Lisa Hammond remembers about being prepped for a rotator-cuff procedure last year was the medical personnel prying a BlackBerry out of her hands.

Hammond, the chief executive of Femail Creations, a Las Vegas-based shopping-catalog company, was on a deadline: She had a date to repair her torn shoulder, but she needed to email approvals for her firm's latest catalog. Hammond says she managed to do both as she was being wheeled on a gurney into the operating room.

Click here for more on executives who disobey doctor's orders.

B School Rankings

The Wall Street Journal/Harris Survey of recruiter rankings of which MBA programs are best in which disciplines:

Click here and look for your alma mater.

Click here for a photo of the top student.

Kagan on Foreign Policy

One of the most interesting thinkers out there: Robert Kagan writing on the state of world affairs. An excerpt:

It is odd because the struggle between modernization and globalization, on the one hand, and traditionalism, on the other, is largely a sideshow on the international stage. The future is more likely to be dominated by the struggle among the great powers and between the great ideologies of liberalism and autocracy than by the effort of some radical Islamists to restore an imagined past of piety. But of course that struggle has taken on a new and frightening dimension. Normally, when old and less technologically advanced civilizations have confronted more advanced civilizations, their inadequate weapons have reflected their backwardness. Today, the radical proponents of Islamic traditionalism, though they abhor the modern world, are nevertheless not only using the ancient methods of assassination and suicidal attacks, but also have deployed the weapons of the modern world against it. Modernization and globalization inflamed their rebellion and also armed them for the fight.

It is a lonely and ultimately desperate fight, for in the struggle between tradition and modernization, tradition cannot win — though traditional forces armed with modern technology can put up a good fight. All the world ’s rich and powerful nations have more or less embraced the economic, technological, and even social aspects of modernization and globalization. All have embraced, albeit with varying degrees of complaint and resistance, the free flow of goods, finances, and services, and the intermingling of cultures and lifestyles that characterize the modern world. Increasingly, their people watch the same television shows, listen to the same music, and go to the same movies. And along with this dominant modern culture they have accepted, even as they may also deplore, the essential characteristics of a modern morality and aesthetics: the sexual as well as political and economic liberation of women, the weakening of church authority and the strengthening of secularism, the existence of what used to be called the counterculture, free expression in the arts (if not in politics), which includes the freedom to commit blasphemy and to lampoon symbols of faith, authority, and morality — these and all the countless effects of liberalism and capitalism unleashed and unchecked by the constraining hand of tradition, a powerful church, or a moralistic and domineering government. The Chinese have learned that while it is possible to have capitalism without political liberalization, it is much harder to have capitalism without cultural liberalization.

Psst. The Meaning of Life. Pass It On.

Anthony Kronman on colleges, universities, and the meaning of life. An excerpt:

As this new vision of higher education took hold in America, faculty members ceased to think of themselves as shapers of souls. Today's students are thus denied the opportunity to explore the question of life's meaning in an organized way, under the guidance of teachers who seek to acquaint their students with the answers contained in the rich tradition whose transmission was once the special duty of the humanities.

It has also put the humanities in the shadow of the natural and social sciences. Judged by the standards of these latter disciplines, research in the humanities is bound to seem less conclusive, less accretive, less quantifiable. In philosophy, one can reasonably claim that there has been no meaningful progress since Plato. For a physicist to say the same thing about Newton would be absurd. Teachers of the humanities who judge their work strictly from the standpoint of the research ideal condemn themselves to an inferior position in the hierarchy of academic authority and prestige.



[HT: Arts & Letters Daily ]