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Fast. Simple. Good. Done.©
This mindset – It works.
Fast.
With how competitive the market place is, with what it takes to be successful, etc. speed is essential. We are often losing money, momentum, engagement and other unintended impacts by allowing things to take so long to complete. With a mindset towards being fast, productivity goes up. Fast doesn’t mean reckless or poor quality. It means fast.
Simple.
Our lives and our work is overly complicated. Solo many things are now over-engineered. Complexity erodes passion. Complexity slows you down. Complexity costs money. And… very often, complexity doesn’t add value. If we looked at many processes and said “ok, let’s start over. What’s the fastest and simplest way to get this done?” We would have a very different approach that what is currently being done in most cases. Fight for simplicity.
Good.
The direct and indirect cost of being “excellent” is sometimes not worth it. You might have a 92% customer satisfaction rate and that might be the right level because you might find that bringing it to 98% would take some significant investment and the return on investment might not be there for it. Often people and organizations are so focused on excellence and being great that they often don’t get out of the box. We have countless examples of leaders who are paralyzed by decision making because of this dynamic.
80% good and 100% out there is much better than 100% perfect and not implemented or implemented way too late. Ask yourself, “in the totality of all that we are doing and what it would cost (money, time, effort) to get from good to great... is it worth it”?
Let’s be clear. Excellence is important. The pursuit of it just needs to be prudent where we should intentionally put the investment for excellence so that we don’t lose getting to even “good” as part of that pursuit.
Done.
Gosh darn it, we need to do a better job at finishing things. So many initiatives and actions in organizations are unfinished and are dragged along throughout time. Effective organizations have learned to drive things to full completion, end them, do examinations of what worked/didn’t work, learn from them and then cleanly move onto something else. By not doing that, dragging all the undone things along slows an organization down, makes things more complex and reduces the ability to produce good results.