The Enemy of Great is Hope

The opening lines of the book, Good to Great, by Jim Collins, start with “Good is the enemy of Great”.  Building a great organization means not being satisfied by doing a good job.

The good job in many cases is the usual business practice of increasing targets by 10-15% on a yearly basis; a classic example of BAU, or business as usual. It relies on the time tested theory of having a stable business environment and growth based on past efforts and results. The problem with this practice, in the words of Peter L Bernstein is “We simply do not know what the future holds”.

In today’s world technology change and attitudinal change have brought about a major disruptive trend. Today’s technology is often history by the end of the week. Yesterday’s technology is obsolete today. Yet, in such an environment, we still see a tendency to live in a state of hope, in a mind-set of carefully choreographed excel sheets and beautifully designed Power point presentations, with awesome bar-charts. These beautiful presentations are the biggest manifestations of hope.

This sense of living on hope is not an isolated and rare event as it may seem. We are all prey to this phenomenon at various stages. When things are not working out or going wrong, we fall back on “Hope”. We hope that things will turn out right. We “Hope” that we will meet our targets. We “Hope” that the economy will be all right. We “Hope” that the boss will give a raise.

The problem with “Hope” is that it lulls us into a sense of complacency. When a sales person sees a “Sales pipeline” he is prone to feel “Hope” that he will meet his target, little realizing that he has to be on guard, and that a sale is a sale only when the money is in the bank, not when he has got a letter of intent, nor when he has got a purchase order.

In his book “Great by Choice” Jim Collins has given a fascinating commentary on the race to reach the South Pole, between two adventurers, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott in 1911. For one team led by Amundsen, the journey was a path to glory while for the other it was a path to defeat and death. The difference between the two is best summarized by these words of Roald Amundsen:

“Victory awaits him who has everything in order – luck people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck”.

To be successful you need to be paranoid, have thought out many variables and have multiple strategies in place. Great leaders are never complacent; never live in hope that things would work as planned. In an article on June 20, 1991, by the LA times, “Nightmare a reality, Microsoft Chief Warns”, it quotes Bill Gates as stating:

"Our nightmare--IBM 'attacking' us in systems software, Novell 'defeating' us in networking and more agile, customer-oriented applications competitors getting their Windows act together--is a reality.”

Hope can be a very disabling attribute. It “disables” action and weakens effort. For success in any venture we have to overcome “Hope” and rely on action. It is therefore only true that the enemy of Great is Hope.

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” - Dale Carnegie