Chapter 17 | Good is the Enemy of Great

Chapter 17 | Good is the Enemy of Great

Years ago a friend and collector gave me a book to read. Now I’m not what you’d call a big reader of books. My Graduate Studies Thesis was a mere 19 pages and was filled mostly with mathematical formulas and is, by any standard, a tough read. 

The book that he passed onto me has turned out to be one of my all time favorites and one I wish had been passed along to me when I was eighteen or so. Because I’m pretty sure my life would have been turned toward excellence much sooner than it was.

Jim Collins and his team of researchers wrote an amazing book called ‘Good to Great’. Here is a link to an article he wrote about it: https://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html#articletop if you get a chance you should take the time to read it. The concepts outlined there are true for any company, not just those listed in the book. Even your company can take advantage of these principals.

At it’s core (if you read further you should now that I am shortcutting what is in the book and you NEED to read it in its entirety to get all the concepts – PS I don’t get any kickbacks, other than maybe knowing someone else along the way might glean many fundamental successful business concepts) the book asks you to answer three basic questions about you and your business.

1.     What is it you are truly passionate about?

2.     What are you better at than anyone else on the planet? 

3.     What drives your economic engine?

Let’s begin with the first question…what is it you are truly passionate about? Well, what is it? You have to know this before you can move forward for the simple fact that if you just pursue something that is ‘interesting’ to you but not something you are truly passionate about, your interest will fade over time and you will not succeed. Perhaps that is why this is the first question in this series of three, lets be honest here, it’s really a simple (but not really) question.

I can tell you what I’m passionate about because it is the core outlined in my mission statement.

“To Enrich Peoples Lives by Bringing My Nature Based Art

into Every Home & Office in the World.”

You’ll notice that it doesn’t talk about money. No. It talks about enriching people’s lives through nature with the desire to do it everywhere! Now if we’re being honest with one another then ok, there will be money involved because one cannot do it everywhere and not make some sort of profit along the way. More on that though when we go to answer the third question.

Moving onto the second question…What are you better at than anyone else on the planet? It can take a pretty big sense of self worth to answer this question. Especially out loud. That sense of worth though is something that will carry you along when things are tough. Remember the three rules to running a successful business? We know tough is just part of it. 

Ask yourself what is it that you would have no problem standing up on the proverbial soapbox in the center square of town and shouting to the world acclaiming your talent. In other words what are you better at than anyone else on the planet?

Long ago I answered this question for myself and I have a great many biases (or what I call reasons) that allow me to sleep at night with my answer.

“I create the best wilderness landscape artwork on the planet. No one does it better!”

Perhaps a side note here would be worthwhile. For me any artist in their genre should know everything they can possibly know about that genre. In photography, believe it or not, that is a lot. Everything from the camera, exposure, light sensitive materials (film, photo material), longevity, darkroom work (in a darkroom and in a digital darkroom) etc. etc. etc. Otherwise a photographer is just that, a photographer – someone who pretty much just presses the shutter.

An artist on the other has to know what they are doing from beginning to end and usually doing all the work themselves. What good is it if some tech in Timbuktu does the work having never stood in the place, only going on what they think looks good? Did you say ‘Nothing’? Well that’s right! Nothing at All.

For me specifically, I do not believe in faking it, it being anything, when it comes to the creation of my artworks. What you see is what I saw. I do not need to make it ‘look good’, or encompass the ‘feeling’ I had when I was there. Many today seem to have no issue with just making crap up which they claim encompasses their ‘experience’ which often lasted hours or even days. Think what you want to think, but ask yourselves which will stand the test of time? – the made up stuff or the pure work? I hope that integrity won’t ever fade and that the pure works will be the ones that stand the test of time. Besides I think there is an up and down escalator at the end of this life and I’d very much like to be on the up escalator.

Now, moving right along….

The third and final question…What drives your economic engine? In other words, if you could put what drives the financial side of your business in a box and label it X, what would X be for you?

To help you answer this question I will share with you mine. My economic engine runs based on Profit per Piece Sold. Yep, the answer can be just that simple.

Think about it for a moment, your business (assuming art is it, for the purposes of this Chapter) runs on being able to make works and sell them. That costs money. That means you need to buy raw materials, make the work, and importantly sell the works for more than it cost you to make them. Why? Because we all have bills to pay.

Chapter 17 | So What Does One Do With This Information?

Those are not the easiest questions in the world to honestly answer and it can take a great deal of introspective and time to get them ‘right’, for you.

But now that we’ve answered those three questions what do we do with them? Jim Collins suggests, through the research he and his team conducted, that you use them to figure out how to blend them all together into a single point of interest. They suggest that if you take each question and put it in a bubble, or circle, and overlay each circle (one for each question) into a Venn diagram that the center section, which is the culmination of all three, encompasses the answer on how to turn your business from Good to Great. See the diagram below to visually see what Jim and his team are talking about.

As one can see the intersection of all three questions (in theory) can be boiled down into a smaller subset from which all three questions have a say. If you can boil it all down into a single concept which has a piece of all three elements, then you would be doing the same things that companies have done to go from being just good and transition to being great. Sounds easy.

Get the book, read the whole thing. Several times. And if you’re like me then listen to it, over and over, until it makes sense.

Then go out and draft your hypothesis and work on it, who knows it might just work.