Leadership lessons from James Cameron and Steve Jobs

More perfection please – Harvard lessons from James Cameron and Steve Jobs

Mar 17th, 2010 | Customer Service | 2 comments

There’s been a tendency in recent years to downplay getting something perfectly right and apply the Pareto Principle of 80/20 instead. If you wait to get it perfectly right, we’re told, you miss the boat. Up to a point. I actually don’t like that way of thinking but can see that it’s necessary. I prefer extremists – ‘monomaniacs’ Peter Drucker used to call them – who obsess over making every detail perfect.

When it comes to a customer experience, it’s the detail that will make or break you. There are no small things. That’s what I’m uneasy about with the ‘go when it’s 80% right’ approach. Or the ‘ready, fire, aim’ approach, as Tom Peters puts it. I guess you can bring the two approaches together – Launch something at 80% then refine it while it is ‘out there’, using customer feedback in real time to adapt it to reach 100%, then keep on going to improve it.

It’s a strategy of ‘emergence’, which fits fast-changing times.

Anyway, what sparked off that thought is a blog post on the BNET network, which is itself fast-emerging as a great portal that aggregates sources from around the net then puts a layer of distillation on top in an attractive way. On this occasion by working with commentators from Harvard. No, I have no affiliation with BNET whatsoever, I just like their output.

Here’s the blog post, from Sean Silverthorne, on working with perfectionist and extremist leaders to produce a stand out innovative customer experience - James Cameron and Steve Jobs: Passionate Leadership .