Core Value #4: The Continual Pursuit of Excellence
Categorized: . Submitted by Ron on
The first time one of our developers saw this, he said, “This one sounds like it should be on a poster with an eagle soaring above a mountain landscape.” I couldn’t really argue so I asked him a question about big-endian and little-endian memory storage. I figured this would buy me enough time to think about it. It worked.
In the end I had to concede that while it does sound a bit grandiose, we chose this specific wording because this is precisely what we mean.
I suppose we could have toned it down a bit and said “we value Continual Improvement,” but that’s pretty lame -- and also not what we mean. If I want to be an Olympic Marathoner and I commit myself to “continual improvement,” I can pretty much bet I won’t ever line up on the Olympic starting line with my country’s uniform on. I’ll become a bit better at running marathons than I am now. But if I want to wear my country’s flag on my shirt and toe the line at the Olympics, I’m going to need to aim quite a bit higher than that. We don’t want to get better. We want to get great.
One interesting element of this Core Value is that it implies that we realize we’ll never reach any state of perfection, but we’re committed to getting as close as we can. For those scientists out there, you might say we’re asymptotically approaching excellence.
Of course, our customers are savvy and realistic enough to know that our software will not be perfect, but they certainly have every right to expect us to be striving hard in that direction. Internally we know that our processes and activities won’t be perfect. In fact, some are far from it. Continually acknowledging this is an important part of the journey to excellence. We applaud those who can readily admit when we fall short and who fully participate in moving us in the direction of excellence.
It’s a marathon, and while major strides toward excellence are of course preferred, even small steps move us toward the finish line. Yeah, the one that’s always inching further toward the horizon.