Excellence = Beyond the Obvious

I was discussing with a few of my friends and the expression “Beyond the Obvious” came in to discussion in some context. But after the discussion was over, the expression stuck in to my mind as a very simple yet effective description of Excellence. Excellence can be described as continuous process of doing better than the level at which you are doing a specific thing. If we perform at level at which we are expected to perform we are doing the obvious thing. When we incorporate things into our routines so that we showcase improvements and we reach next level of excellence. So when we go beyond the obvious, we are on path of improving excellence.

Let us check with a few real life examples

If you are meeting your SLAs with customer you are good but when you surpass SLAs and showcase different level of value adds to customer without incurring any additional cost, you have reached a new level of excellence and you will definitely see a positive vibes from customer. You are expected to deliver to SLA, which is obvious state, but when you go beyond, you see the difference.

I was in Tokyo for work and travelling in a taxi from hotel to Office. Unfortunately the driver took some wrong turn and he had to do some additional zig-zag to reach to the destination. We observed that he has missed the route but kept quiet as we were new to the country. After reaching the destination, the driver apologized for little detour that he had to take and reduced some money from the total bill. We were expecting a sorry from him being in Japan which was kind of obvious for us but the driver went beyond and we still remember him. He simply had raised the bar for himself.

We were supporting multiple applications of a customer and during discussions; we came to know that customer desperately needs a specific application to be developed but had no money to do the same. So the Project manager from our company took entire team in confidence and they all chipped in a few hours daily for a period of time and built the application without the knowledge of customer and presented the same to customer as a Christmas gift. Customer was so happy and overwhelmed with this nice gesture of going beyond the expectation of keeping the lights on for the applications where we were supporting. Customer not only paid for the efforts spent by the team, but always remembered this gesture.  The relationship with customer moved to a much higher level.

We can remember several such examples from one’s life which reinforces the thought that when one goes beyond what is expected from him / her individually or collectively; he / she reaches a new level of “expected” and in the process benefits immensely with the positive responses which are received during this process. This is nothing but raising one’s level of excellence.

So please look at what is expected from you at any given task / activity in the personal or professional sphere; try to go beyond and raise your level of excellence automatically.