Introduction

Who Kidnapped Excellence? What Stops Us From Giving and Being Our Best is written for YOU! Whether you are a frontline employee, supervisor, manager, CEO, mother, father, or spouse, this book has a personal message for you. It is intended for people to use both in their organizational roles and in their personal lives.

In Who Kidnapped Excellence?, Excellence gets kidnapped at Gorman-Scott Inc. and is replaced by Average, who is a makeup artist. Interestingly, months go by before Leadership recognizes the change. A ransom note left on the conference room table is the impetus that sets Leadership in motion to get their Excellence back. Leadership enlists Excellence’s team (Passion, Competency, Flexibility, Communication, and Ownership) in the quest.

But Average is not easily thwarted. He assembles his own team (N. Different, N. Competency, N. Flexibility, Miss Communication, and Poser), who dig in their heels and use all their cunning powers of deception to keep Excellence from returning and to keep Performance falling.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

As this organizational good-versus-evil confrontation unfolds, Dave, the long-standing deliveryman for Gorman-Scott Inc., comes face-to-face with Average in his personal life. The stories of Dave and the organization intertwine in their common challenges: first, they need to fully recognize the presence of Average, and then they need to return Excellence to her rightful place.

In the “Resources” section, Dave offers practical advice to help others gain and maintain excellence in their personal lives and their work. The last section, “People and Companies Who ‘Get It,’ ” offers insight into people and companies who demonstrate excellence.

Note to the Reader

Most companies talk about excellence on a routine basis. Yet we do so without a common definition. How do we define excellence? When we began this book, we initially identified many qualities of excellence. However, over the course of two and a half years, we whittled the number down to five. This was no easy task. As we examined these qualities, we realized that many of the traits were actually a subset of one of the five core qualities.

Now we believe we have identified those core qualities/elements of excellence. Additionally, we believe that in this book we have created a common language that more accurately defines and explains the concept of excellence. We do not assert that these are the only aspects of excellence, but we do contend that if one can attend to these five core elements consistently, one has, in earnest, begun the journey toward excellence.

Storytelling can be an entertaining and powerful way of presenting new information or reinforcing what has been learned. Therefore, we chose to personify as characters the qualities of Excellence and Average, along with their respective teams, using narrative to tell the story about the elusive yet attainable quality of excellence. We believe that this creates a unique and interesting format to best explain how to restore excellence and remove the barriers that stop us from giving and getting our best. However, this style of narration presents a challenge for the reader in differentiating the personified traits that represent Excellence from the ways in which the words are used in normal, everyday conversation. To help with this, we have capitalized the personified traits (Excellence, Average, etc.) and used lowercase for the normal, everyday usage of the words (excellence, average, etc.).

Too often, both at home and at work, our perception of excellence is unknowingly compromised by the insidious creep of circumstance, rationalization, and duplicity that resets the yardstick by which we measure our performance. We become inured to our circumstances and environment and fail to recognize that average has displaced excellence. Who Kidnapped Excellence? will cause you to look in the mirror and truthfully evaluate yourself. Once you have come face-to-face with your own reality, you can then draw from Dave’s journal and the other lessons in this book to make practical changes in your life.