dispatches from the new world of work

Excellence Oath and Credo

Excellence Oath and Credo Cover Art Tom has been developing the "Excellence Oath and Credo" for a time. He blogged about it, included a version in The Little BIG Things, and has now added the Oath of Office for Managers/Servant Leaders. According to Tom "It is a set of ideas ("Principles for doing business well and profitably"? "Elements of Excellence"?) worthy of attention and emulation."

With a focus on the development of your team's talent and considering leadership a sacred trust, Tom encourages you to be "explorer-adventurers proceeding toward individual and collective growth.". He puts it this way, "Our job as leaders—the alpha and the omega and everything in between—is abetting the sustained growth and success and engagement and enthusiasm and commitment to Excellence of those, one at a time, who directly or indirectly serve the ultimate customer."

Joy Stauber worked her magic on the design of this piece. We hope you enjoy it. You can download the PDF; it will reside on the Free Stuff page, which is chock full of other Excellent PDFs.

Shelley Dolley posted this on 06/07/10.

Comments

Thanks for making this "reassembly" available via free .pdf. Enough versions of a good idea presented in different formats provides opportunity to connect with people not previously reached!

The concept of "Encourage failure" and "Celebrate failure" is, however, now over-hyped and negatively inverted from good leadership techniques that encourage and celebrate experimentation, testing, prototyping, modeling, iterative design, etc.

Being able to plan for and successfully avoid failure, and to resiliently mitigate its effects when true failure occurs, is a critical skill - including how to prepare for the unpredictable (NNTaleb's current work in re: true Black Swan events) and what to do when they occur.

Watering down "failure" as a replacement for normal life processes - which are seldom "straight lines" to "success" - may also water down "critical care" life skills. This is not dissimilar to the "aria fritta" of several decades of giving "A" grades to everyone, and no "F's" because a failing grade may warp one's psyche for life.

As Thomas A. Edison stated, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

This is not just a difference in semantics. It's not a "Pollyanna" approach. Recasting the iterative process (experimenting, testing, et.al.) as necessary mini-failures on the road to success has (unintentional) high risk of collateral damage.

Be more critical about "successful failure" as the ruling paradigm to have good discussion.

"Dare to Fail?" - BALONEY!!
(See http://wp.me/pVUDj-4w )

Posted by Randy Bosch at June 7, 2010 3:43 PM

I love this! (It almost made me teary when reading it :)
Now let's get fast food restaurant chains and franchises across the nation to adopt it - wouldn't that be amazing?!

Posted by anna smith at June 7, 2010 4:21 PM

Thank you! I love your writing Tom; you keep me inspired and provide fuel for my fire.

Appreciate the thoughts.

Cheri

Posted by Cheri Baker at June 9, 2010 2:23 PM