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"The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory".
The risk of developing for perfection may mean longer time frames, more funding and less market reward.
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What to do about it!
There is always a strong PD battle between designing 'the perfect' product and one that is 'good enough'. Chrysler's Chief Executive Director, Deiter Zetsche, claims, "Relatively good is not good enough", regarding his company's competitive battle to match Japan's product quality and customer acceptance successes. Yet, Japanese car companies, e.g. Toyota, practice Kaizen (incremental improvement, or continuous Improvement). So… 'good enough' can be achieved, but it must include those 'qualities' that satisfy the customer and market as well as the company. This is for market and product research to discover.
Incremental improvement in quality and reliability (and most features) can be done during product development through FEFO prototyping, whereas ultimate product perfection should be accomplished in the market from which real user, competition, social, technical and 'usefulness' feedback comes. But, this presumes that the first release of a product is adequate for the market - perfection in all product features is not necessary, but perfection in the quality and reliability of the implemented features is absolutely a requirement.
"Here, 'good' is a stepping-stone on the way to 'perfect'. You do the best you can and put it out there. And then you tweak it and put it out there again."
One final thought about risk-taking: many talk about the need to encourage people to take risks. But when failures do occur as a result of risk, remember… someone said it was OK to take that risk! Thus, there needs to be failure management and appropriate support of those taking risks.
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©2003, Richard M. (Dick) Haney
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