In search of mediocrity

Citation

Marren, P. (2004), "In search of mediocrity", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 25 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbs.2004.28825aaf.001

In search of mediocrity

Patrick MarrenPatrick Marren is a strategic consultant with the Futures Strategy Group. Clients he has worked for have included the US Coast Guard, NASA, the FAA, the Panama Canal Commission, various aspects of the US military, and numerous Fortune 500 companies. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL, Marrenp@aol.com

In 1982, the business world was enraptured by a book by Peters and Waterman entitled In Search of Excellence. It detailed the methods and approaches of a group of companies that had achieved sustained success by using time-tested methods. Since the publication of this work, the vast majority of paragons included in the book have undergone severe trauma; in many cases their very survival has been threatened by gross management error, overweening arrogance, the transformation of the competitive dynamic within their industries, foreign competition, and other heretofore unthinkable ills.

Many of the companies lauded by Peters and Waterman have since rebounded from their near-death experiences to achieve a sort of competitive health, but none of them has recovered its seemingly insurmountable position of 15 years ago. Much of this change can be attributed to the natural (though, by Peters and Waterman, unnoticed) tidal changes that are so much a part of capitalism – the "process of creative destruction" defined by economists such as Hayek.

Yet, instead of focusing directly upon the very obvious and critical theme of business failure, the vast majority of business publications since then have shrunk from addressing the negative in favor of producing cheerleading accounts of the comparatively rare instances in which true business excellence has been achieved. The underlying supposition is that, if only you, the reader, were to replicate the actions of the praiseworthy subjects of their texts, then you too would enter the Valhalla of "excellent managers".

The hard truth is that excellence in business is as rare as excellence in any other human endeavor. Yet, unlike piano-playing, for example, business for most people is not something that can be abandoned as hopeless after a consultation between teacher and parents. For most human beings, business is something that they must pursue in spite of mounting evidence that they have no "ear" for it. Square as they are, they must attempt for the 40-odd years of their post-educational, pre-Florida existence to cram themselves into the small round hole of "management excellence".

Hence the proliferation of books holding out the chimerical promise of "leadership" to legions of Walter Mittys, of hardheaded aggressiveness to thousands of irresolute bachelor assistant managers, of financial wizardry to millions who have not balanced their checkbooks in a decade.

This emphasis on the few examples of excellence is wholly understandable, because it sells. Many have already noted the similarity between the business-book industry and its close kin, the diet-and-exercise book business. Each is selling a dream of potency, achievement, and cutting a fine figure in front of one's friends (and, even more important, one's enemies). In few spheres of literature have so many "classics" been produced, if Twain's definition of "classic" is employed: "a book that everyone talks about and nobody reads". We might alter this definition a bit in the present instance: diet and business "classics" are books that everyone buys, but nobody reads. (A much more satisfying situation for the author: Tom Peters' and Oprah Winfrey's royalty checks certainly dwarf those of Shakespeare.)

It comes as no surprise, then, to discover that the focus of business "classics" is tightly engaged upon the few, flickering, and quickly extinguished tapers of "excellence", while almost no one steps back to look at the larger reality, i.e. the darkness that surrounds and often snuffs out these lone candles. That darkness is mediocrity. Mediocrity is a far more robust substance than excellence; indeed, excellence cannot exist independent of this differentiating element. Excellence literally requires a context of mediocrity: the verb to excel automatically begs the question, in relation to what?

This returns us to the point made earlier: that business is not, for most of s, an elective course. Despite our ill-suitedness; our lack of ability; our knowledge that we can never become a Mozart; our envy of the neighbor down the street who is in fact becoming a Mozart, or at least a Rubinstein; despite the indigestion and the moans we occasionally elicit from our captive audience, we are forced to continue pounding the keys, butchering the music set before us, which is specially designed to be played by virtuosi. Our slight consolation is that the concert is paid for, and that our hatchet job will heighten the appreciation of the aficionado for the truly exceptional work of our betters.

So this dissonance, the benighted and derided flailing of the underachiever and the born bureaucrat, is the standard by which business excellence must be judged. Indeed, we can go much further than this: mediocrity appears to be an essential companion to excellence. Excellence is promoted and rewarded with the leadership of the relentlessly mediocre. The excellence of one era, once institutionalized and codified, inescapably becomes the mediocrity of the next. And the best companies in the world may be distinguished at least as much by their consciousness, recognition and realistic management of the mediocre as they are by their attention to "excellence".

Mediocrity has been too long relegated to the province of fiction. Its ubiquity, its inevitability in any human organization, its sinister and its humane aspects, have been treated far too little by scientists of management. This task has been left to the novelist: Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Joseph Heller, George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Milan Kundera have had far more to tell us about mediocrity than the legion of business academics, the occasional "Peter principle" notwithstanding.

In the absence of direct attention to the subject, managers have assiduously tried for the past two centuries to root incompetence, laziness, bureaucracy, pettiness, territoriality, and other forms of mediocrity out of their organizations. Total failure has only caused them to redouble their efforts to heroic levels. The time may have come when we are able to recognize that these things are dearer to us than the organizations are. Mediocrity deserves attention because it is the inescapable background against which enterprise operates; it is as relentless as the ocean, and in the long run, those who operate in defiance of its laws will be swept away.

Defining mediocrity

Mediocrity is defined in the dictionary as "ordinariness". This straight definition eschews the essentially negative connotation that the word inevitably conveys. Our culture is one in which mere ordinariness or commonness is unacceptable as an ambition for individuals. This despite the indisputable fact that the operation of statistical law will condemn precisely half of the human race to this unenviable estate (or worse).

The first thing to be noted about mediocrity, then, is that it is a relative concept. We are mediocre within a particular context, in relation to others who are superior (or inferior). Placed within a different context, we might rise to Olympian heights of excellence – or fall to the deepest trough of incompetence. An indifferent high school student of the 1990s, placed within the scientific and cultural context of the middle ages, would very likely be esteemed as a particularly enlightened genius – or be locked up in an asylum or prison as a particularly dangerous and delusional lunatic. Conversely, a quite distinguished and accomplished artisan of the middle ages, transferred to the world of today, would find himself unemployable and condemned to the futile pursuit of a GED diploma or truck driver's license.

A second and related point is that mediocrity must be distinguished from out-and-out incompetence or stupidity. The mediocre is almost never bad enough to merit discharge. It will never achieve the heights of excellence, but it will often outlast the exceptional, and will always manage to beat out the truly bad. Until recently, most businesses have achieved great success simply by using an army of mediocrities to implement the received inspiration of a few putatively excellent top managers. The negative connotation noted above, then, must not be allowed to blind management to the uses of the mediocre. Many baseball teams in the heat of a pennant race have been pilloried for obtaining a pitcher with a losing record "for the stretch run". In fact, the alternative to the journeyman with the 7-12 record is often a rookie who would be likely to post a record of 2-17. The difference, to the enlightened manager, may be five wins and a pennant.

Third, due to the negative connotation that "mediocrity" has picked up over the past few centuries, the merely ordinary is subject to the contempt of the excellent and, more importantly, those who would be excellent (that is, the vast majority of the mediocre masses themselves). Thus the very concept of mediocrity inculcates a certain self-hatred. This self-hatred is very much akin to that inspired within the average healthy woman when she opens a magazine to a photograph of a skeletal model in a skimpy bathing suit.

This self-hatred assumes a belief on the part of the person in question that such a skeletal state (or a management promotion) is desirable; that it is in fact within the realm of possibility for her or him; and that failure to achieve such a state reflects her or his personal moral failure. That the reality of the busy life of an average woman precludes the ascetic diet and exercise regime of a professional model, or that the pyramidal business organization dictates that there will be many more "failures" than "successes", is disregarded, a further delusion inherent in the concept of "mediocrity".

This points up a fourth result of the notion of "mediocrity", the hatred of the "excellent" by the merely "average". No amount of objective rationalization can convince the "average" person that all human categorizations (such as promotions, employee evaluations, fame, etc.) are inevitably subjective and have nothing to do with the essential moral worth of the people involved. So a related loathing of the superior is inculcated within the heart of the "inferior".

The earliest literary example of this syndrome is that of Cain. His sacrifices are rejected, unjustly, to his mind; his brother Abel, who is also, infuriatingly, more comely, has his sacrifices accepted by an apparently capricious and unjust god. Cain's response to this situation is recapitulated in many business situations today, in the schadenfraude of the "subordinate" at seeing a "superior" laid low, even when that laying low has disastrous consequences for the "subordinate".

Another element of mediocrity is its dependence upon rank-ordering of worth or achievement by some outside authority. Mediocrity, being average, must be confirmed in that averageness by measurement. An authority must be established and accepted by the mass for this measurement function to be effective.

Mediocrity therefore implies a reward system that elevates a small percentage of the mass of people to positions of influence and authority, and an outside measuring authority to enforce upon the mass a self-image that they are likely instinctively to reject. The entire concept of mediocrity thus presumes something very like the traditional pyramidal hierarchy that has been the dominant model for human institutions since the beginning of civilization.

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  … [T]he fact is that bureaucratic organizations are essentially geared for defeat. That is, for each person who is promoted a number are left behind.

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  – Harry Levinson, Psychological Man, The Levinson Institute, Inc., 1976, p. 56.

Mediocrity, then, is the dark side of the moon: a pock-marked hemisphere of institutional reality that is almost never visible to the observer. The sunlight of attention and reward constantly illuminates only that which is excellent, while the vast majority of human experience (and organizational reality) remains in perpetual darkness.

Yet it stands to reason that the excellence of the few depends integrally upon the relative failure of the mass, and that mass's acceptance of its subordinate yoke. To understand what is excellent, we need to understand what is not. Mediocrity probably deserves some serious study.