Perfect is now the Enemy of Done

Every entrepreneurial company, regardless of size, never has enough people, money and time to accomplish all the goals its leaders can envision for it. It’s the nature of the beast.

Given that resources are always deficient in some way, it’s imperative to remember that perfect is the enemy of done. EOS^® employs the 20/80 rule throughout the system. Focus on accomplishing the 20% that will help you achieve 80% of the result.

A Best Practice

Leaders who try for perfect tend to keep refining, touching up, worrying that they missed something, testing, retesting, and then testing again. For example, if you don’t have a documented customer service process in place that represents your best practices for achieving customer delight, you are faced with a choice:

• Option 1: You can spend the next couple of months (quarters, year?) researching other people’s best practices in your industry, deciding which of those to adopt, then writing them up in excruciating detail, proofing them, running them in trials, analyzing the results, redoing some prior steps, running more trials perhaps, and finally implementing them.
• Option 2: Or you could create your best practices very simply, in a 20/80 rule way, by documenting the major steps in the process at a very high level with a handful of bullets under each step. Then insist that everyone follow them. Finally, modify them, if and when necessary.

The same principle can be applied when creating your Scorecard, working on your Rocks, or solving your Issues. Don’t get stuck trying to be perfect – some progress is better than no progress at all. It’s the forward motion that will propel you towards the results you want to achieve.