Seth's Blog: The Curse of Great Expectations

Seth Godin, of "Purple Cow" fame, has an interesting piece on benchmarking and how we are always trying to continuously improve or match everyone else and how this is sometimes not for the best.

In addition to the stress, benchmarking against the universe actually encourages us to be mediocre, to be average, to just do what everyone else is doing. The folks who invented the Mini (or the Hummer, for that matter) didn’t benchmark their way to the edges. Comparing themselves to other cars would never have created these fashionable exceptions. What really works is not having everything being up to spec… what works is everything being good enough, and one or two elements of a product or service being AMAZING.