I find one of the phrases that seems to have become prevalent in my profession – electronic gizmos – since about 1990 has been “Perfection is the enemy of good“.
An old phrase – Wiki tells me it goes back to at least 1600 or so. The original intent seems to be related to “Why fix it if it ain’t broke?” Seems reasonable. It’s intended to imply that perfection isn’t obtainable and good will suffer is perfection is blindly pursued.
“Perfection is the enemy of good enough“
But now we’re talking a different viewpoint: good vs. good enough – along with who and what defines “good enough”.
What bothers me is that this phrase has become an excuse to cut corners – to accept “good enough” as a goal rather than strive for perfection – “If we can’t achieve perfection, why start? Good enough will sell.” The old Apple iPhone 4 proved that.
One should set the bar high – if one strives for perfection, one might achieve excellence. If one strives for good enough, one might achieve mediocre. If one strives for mediocre, one achieves many product returns, a bad reputation, and embarrassing videos of product failures on YouTube.
“Best” or “better-than-the-rest” might be good enough, but good enough for the sake of “it’ll do” is at best “middle-of-the-pack”, “also-ran”, or as they say, “2nd place is the first loser”. I suppose there’s a market for that – the success of Dollar General and Walmart demonstrate that.
But sometimes there’s a higher calling. One does not become an Olympic-grade athlete by striving for good enough. The old Hewlett-Packard company did not gain its reputation for excellence by striving for good enough. As excellent as the products were (a quibble with their o’scopes though), perfection was the goal and continuing improvements on excellence was the result (and the HP reputation for excellence was so good, the entity using that name today still lives on that reputation while the group that gained that reputation has been sold off and renamed a number of times – I miss a good HP measurement instrument).
Good enough implies cutting corners. Quality costs more than good enough … I once worked on a project where the accountants wanted to know why a $5 opamp was used when 50ยข opamps were available. The accountants won the argument; the result was good enough … but not the excellence originally striven for. 5% performance rather than the better than 1% desired.
First one group cuts a corner, then the next group cuts its corners, and so on. It’s like continuously “saving 10%”. Pretty soon, the square that was originally desired has become a circle … because it’s “good enough”.
I know, I know – market forces and stock valuations.
There was a bridge in Florida that was deemed good enough.