Something About Me I Thought You Should Know

You should know that Cormac McCarthy is my favorite novelist. I expressed this to Joan Silber years ago, when she was doing her time as my writing teacher at Warren Wilson, and she expressed distress, saying McCarthy was “too mean to live”. A recent NY Times review says that “The Road“, McCarthy’s latest, “…would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty.” A great line, and one that I think would be a fine choice for describing Mr. McCarthy’s entire writing career. Maybe even fit for his headstone a few years hence.

McCarthy routinely swings for the fences, thematically speaking. He leaves the impression that his work is critical to him, even when no one else is looking. In a conversation about Quality, then, McCarthy is relevant because he provides an inspired example of how to go about being great at what we do.

Greatness, organizationally speaking, is not only relevant to the Quality discussion but the entire point. And the pursuit of greatness, as wise men from McCarthy to Jim Collins understand perfectly, can be pure misery; it is all too alluring to be directed into easy mediocrity by the siren song of quarterly earnings report.

McCarthy didn’t become financially successful until the publication of “All the Pretty Horses” in 1992. He’d been a published author at that point for nearly 30 years, since 1965’s “The Orchard Keeper”. Both “Blood Meridian” and “Suttree” had been published in the meantime and most people who know what they’re talking about consider those two novels to be his best work. He’d therefore gone about the business of being great with no external reward for nearly 30 years.

The point I’m making is relatively simple. Focus on short term results, and you sacrifice your shot at greatness. Focus on long term strategy and you’re equally lost. Focus, however, on becoming great at what you do, and short term/long term results will eventually take care of themselves. We’re uniquely positioned, as Quality Professionals, to advocate the continuous pursuit of organizational greatness.

All organizations are able to articulate the thing at which they would like to be great. They should also be able, with some guidance, to define greatness in specific terms. The role of the true Quality Geek should be to facilitate this discussion, to midwife the organization’s level one CTQs describing that at which the enterprise wishes to be great, and then to ruthlessly hold the organization’s performance up to that unforgiving mirror and require nothing less than unrelentingly honest self assessment. There’s no way of really knowing, but I suspect that if Cormac were a CEO, this is the kind of behavior he would respect.