I was in New York City last week, the first time since August of this year, and had a chance to see the 9/11 memorial site from above (36 floors in fact) for the first time – and it is impressive.  It was a great trip overall, especially with a customer meeting, but I think I will save that for another blog.

I do bring up New York though because I saw a framed photograph of the side of a building (taken presumably of a building in New York) that had the phrase “Good Enough is the Enemy of Great” (or something to that effect – I wish I had captured it exactly and found the source).

In any case, it reminded me of two conflicting quotes.  The first opens up Jim Collins’ book, “Good to Great” … “Good is the enemy of great.”  The other is the famous Voltaire quote … “Perfect is the enemy of good.”

So, who is wrong, Collins or Volataire?  Maybe neither.  Or both.

My opinion on the topic is a strong one (and likely more of less lines up with Collins … it has been a long time since I read the book).  My opinion is … both are correct.  In the context of this blog, I am going to apply the quote to business – and business software in particular – but I think both still applies to all aspects of life.

How can I be so seemingly two-faced?  Well, I think it goes like this … determine the one or two areas where you are going to excel.  Ideally, again speaking in business terms here, the one or two areas where you can be better than everyone else (I think Collins would call this your hedgehog).  In this one (or few) areas … beyond the shadow of a doubt … good enough is the enemy of great.  Anything less than great is not acceptable.

Conversely, in every other single area, perfect (great) is the enemy of good.  Huh, you say?  Well, to pull another cliche, you can’t be great at everything.  In ever area outside your key (strategic) focus area(s), is time spent away from getting the right stuff perfect.  After “good enough” it becomes a distraction.  In fact, this is the problem with most business software today.  A lot of software started out being really good (maybe even great) at what it did.  But customers and internal stakeholders always want to add new and pet features (without ever really questioning if it was going to make things better) until the software starts to crumble under its’ own weight and often becomes almost unusable or at least unrecognizable from its’ original purpose.  A symptom of this is a quote like, “I used to really like Product x – it just worked and was so easy to use.”

So, to wrap up … both Collins and Volataire are/were correct.  Pick your strategic and differentiated value proposition and be great at it and good enough at all adjacent areas.

But wait … like all rules there is an exception to this one too.  User Experience.  Good enough is always the enemy to great user experience and all software needs great user experience.

til next time … Kirk