The Paradox of Excellence: How Great Performance Can Kill Your Business

by David Mosby, Michael Weissman

Are you striving for excellence yet find your efforts increasingly taken for granted and undervalued? You’re not alone. Many companies discover their improved performance doesn’t translate into higher perceived value. In fact, it simply shifts the customer’s expectations upward, causing the customer to take the new, improved performance for granted. High-performance companies unwittingly create unrealistic customer expectations that become impossible to meet. In this important book, the authors use a realistic story that illustrates the paradox of excellence¾the better you perform, the more invisible you become to everything but bad news¾shows the symptoms and causes, and provides clear guidance for overcoming this perplexing dilemma. The Paradox of Excellence introduces an entertaining story with characters that are easy to relate to, ideas that can be readily implemented, and a practical framework for achieving long-term success.    

Genres: Business

224 pages, Paperback

First published August 17, 2005

Reviews

[João Pedro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simple enough to understand the concept

[Christine · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a sucker's book. A great summary of a problem with no way to solve the problem.
The idea is: A company can have a great client, but you screw up once and you lose the client because you forget to always tell your client how well you are performing for them.
the entire premise of the book is a company must be able to have the infrastructure in place to measure, and track how well they perform. Many are not able to do this and if you are not able to this is not something you can change over night - or even in a year.
The book is full of platitudes and basic ideas. no substance.

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book details an interesting paradox: your own great performance can be the cause of losing a client. In other words, you set the bar so high that one failure can cause the client to leave. Unless you're totally overstaffed with people who do nothing but interact with the client to remind them of how great you are, there really is no feasible solution to the problem posed.