Voltaire, a French philosopher, said “Perfect is the enemy of good.” Even though we have more tasks than time, we lose perspective and become perfectionists about every detail. It’s like new parents who used to scoff at other moms and dads for buying their child designer clothes and baby gear, only to find themselves doing the same. When it is our baby, we want everything to be perfect.

When we started IncentOne, the head of our marketing firm had a connection at a radio station and got us inexpensive radio spots because a sponsor backed out at the last minute. We had little budget so the voice over was done by someone at our marketing firm. He went to the studio to create the radio spot. They completed the spot and it was surprisingly good given how much time was spent on it. I listened to it and approved it. Then something struck me. How would people remember it? Then I remembered the sound that came at the end of every Intel commercial. What if we created a similar sound? My agency guy had already left the studio. I made him go back and add a sound to the end. It took almost as long to add the sound as it did to do the ad. This was my baby and my baby was going to have the perfect bassinette.

Talk about a loss of perspective. A company like IncentOne that few had heard of before, that had a few random spots on the radio that we got for almost free. We lose perspective when it is our baby. Unfortunately, this is not a once in a while lapse. It happens every day.

This is debilitating enough when it is just you. But it can be disastrous when you develop a disdain for anyone who works with you who doesn’t bring the same intensity (i.e., craziness) to every detail. Regardless of whether the people we are working with have slept or been paid a market salary, we expect perfection at every step of the process. We develop a mania around perfection and attention to detail that is misplaced.

When we started IncentOne, we had to convince national retailers that integrating their gift cards into our incentive program was a powerful opportunity for them. To do that, we created a slick marketing package that highlighted the values of being part of our service. The package mimicked the blue and gold color scheme of our logo. In those days, when marketing packages needed to be printed in large quantities, they were run on huge presses like the ones on Varick Street in New York City that we were using. The first run of the materials seemed a bit off in the colors and my brother and I asked them to adjust the colors. We asked them to adjust the colors over and over. I am sure a few times they never changed the color and just represented the same ones to us to make us stop. At one point, they even told us that it depended on the lighting, even though the lighting had not changed. Every time we asked for a change, we went cross the street to the twenty-four-hour diner and Dan and I debated the color palate. I think we hold the record for the most food eaten between midnight and 6 a.m. By the end of the night, which was around 6 a.m., the production guys in the print shop were trying to figure out how to kill my brother and I and hide the bodies in the vats of paint. No jury would have convicted them. Needless to say, we had lost perspective.

Watson-Watt, who developed early warning radar in Britain to counter the rapid growth of the German Luftwaffe, propounded a “cult of the imperfect”, which he stated as “Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes.”[i] No one wants an ugly baby. While attention to detail is a good thing, taking it too far can stifle progress, and doesn’t make the baby any better looking.