Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow

CHAPTER 6

Barriers

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

—G. K. Chesterton 1910, British Author and Journalist

 

To start the chapter, I want to explain why I chose the starting quote. The sentence that you probably have heard a lot more frequently is “If something is worth doing, it is worth doing right.” Behind that quote stands a certain amount of perfectionism that is very often necessary to achieve extraordinary results.

But sometimes there is not enough time or resources to do it per fectly or even right. So the question is whether it is worth doing at all. It could be that with an 80 percent solution, you could be much better off than with a perfect solution that will never come. Speed is very important. Time to market is an important factor, whether exter nally to your customers or internally in competition with others in your organization.

It is worthwhile to realize that there are many situations where a suboptimal solution is actually more successful. I am not advocating striving for general mediocrity but for you to realize that a solution that misses its time to market might be useless, while one that hits the market quickly can create high value. One thing often overlooked is that results today are much more team oriented and collaborative then they were in the past. If you have a single actor creating something to be used in its final stage and have an organization that expects everything it receives in that final state, you will need people to produce ...