Have you ever noticed how some products work really well? Take, for example, the new Tropicana orange juice bottle. The cap has a plastic seal around it that immediately tells you whether anyone has tampered with the bottle. But the plastic material can be easily removed because it breaks away when you pull on it. When you take the cap off for the first time, you see another seal that provides additional assurance that no one has opened the bottle since it left the factory. But there is a handy tab you can grasp, allowing you to easily remove the tab and start enjoying the juice.
The juice itself has a consistent quality from bottle to bottle, week to week, month to month, and year to year.
Of course, none of this occurs by happenstance. Many different people within the Tropicana organization and its suppliers must have taken deliberate steps to do a good job.(This supposition is confirmed by an article I found on Tropicana’s New Bottling Facility.)
I know nothing about the Tropicana organization except what I can infer from the juice it sells. But I am confident that the culture is enfused with a commitment to quality that affects everything they do, from how they dress, how they run meetings, how they work with each other, to how they select the oranges, how they pick and pack them, how they store them, and, ultimately, how they make the juice.
Contrast that experience with what all of us have encountered far too often with organizations that provide mediocre goods and services. Who has not chafed when a machine answers the customer service line with the message, “Please hold. Your call is very important to us. Someone will be with you shortly?” And then we hear some tinny music or, worse, the same advertisement for Brake Busters Products, for 5 or 10 minutes or longer, all without ever knowing how long this will last. And then someone picks up the phone who is unable to answer our question or find someone who can.
This kind of treatment is disrespectful; some might even call it contemptuous. It’s not good work. The people in charge of this part of the organization are not doing the best they can.
How do I reach this conclusion? Because I, like you, have had experience with automated answering systems that do a much better, much more polite job. They indicate approximately how long the wait will be. They offer you choices, such as the option to leave your number for a call back later, so that you don’t have to hold the phone indefinitely. They tell you that you can send an email or go to a chat window online.
Midphase Hosting, the service that hosts this website, is like that.
That is one of the reasons I chose it and continue to use it. Whenever something comes up where I need help at anytime of the day and on any day of the week, I can get quick help through a chat service.
Doing good work is a business virtue. When I talk about the 7 core business virtues or, as I sometimes call them, the 7 habits of trustworthy people and organizations, I mention this one first: Do good work. If you exchange value for value, the value you give should be the best of which you are capable given the available time and resources. That doesn’t mean everyone has to build a Rolls Royce. But if you make Chevrolets, make them the best possible Chevrolets. Don’t skimp on effort. Or, as the marketing slogan puts it, at Ford, Quality is Job 1.
Mediocrity is a vice. Excellence is a virtue. Not everyone can excel at the same level. We all know that. But everyone can do the best she can. Everyone can make the best effort. No one should accept a mediocre result—from herself or others—if time and resources are available to do a better job.