Excellence by a Tenth of a Second

Giacomo won last year's Kentucky Derby by a thin margin, but that's all it took. A small measure of extra effort can give you the edge, often the difference between victory and defeat, fame and obscurity. Which horse finished second in that race, anyway?

That is our business, isn't it? Being a friend to our country, serving it? We perform myriad tasks, but the strongest common thread is that they are all directed toward the service of our nation. So, does Mr. Callaghan"s view in the middle of this page cover all we do? Is the Navy's mission, however articulated, really an exercise in the pursuit of abstract excellence?

We have a lot of people, 360,000 or so, and they have nearly 360,000 reasons for having come on board. I've heard many-service to country, education, travel, I need something to do until I figure out what I want to be when I grow up, etc. No one I've yet encountered, however, said he or she joined because doing so would provide the ideal opportunity to pursue excellence.

But that is precisely what we do. By acclamation, we are the world's most powerful Navy. Other navies don't just want to emulate us; they want to be us. Why do you suppose that is? Sure, we have tremendous advantages in materiel and natural resources, but we seem to be doing the same job, or more of one with an ever-decreasing number of ships, facilities, and personnel. Something has to be happening that lets us continue doing more and more with steadily less and less, and I think it's contained in Mr. Callaghan's observation.

Excellence comes to the fore in all cases, all the time. It's the way the world was constructed. The Pareto principle, often called the "80 / 20 rule," is familiar and worthy of some further examination. Somewhat oversimplified, the rule states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts; 20% of your stock takes up 80% of your warehouse space; 80% of your stock comes from 20% of your suppliers; 20% of your staff produce 80% of your results.

There are those who find this a bit simplistic. They're welcome to, but I'll refer them to a study performed a few years back by the Prudential Insurance Company, which dug into it a bit further. After confirming that yes, 80% of its sales were coming from 20% of its staff, company officers got curious about that 20%. They found that those in the top 20% made 16 times the money that the lower 80% did. Digging further, they looked into the top 20% of the top 20%, (the top 4%), and found that those people made 32 times the average of the lower 80%. And of course, the top .8% (the top 20% of that group) made 54 times the average of the lower 80%.

So excellence is rewarded. The market pays more, whether measured in dollars or some other way, for what it knows to be among the very best-Rolls-Royce and automobiles; Brooks Brothers and clothing.

This is not news. It gets more interesting, however, when one considers the difference between the excellent and the ordinary. The top earners weren't, in all likelihood, 54 times more talented or 54 times smarter than their colleagues, and I know they couldn't have been working 54 times as hard. Something more had to be in the equation.

Consider a horse race. In the 2005 Kentucky Derby, the winning horse finished 1 ¼ miles in 2:02:75. The second place horse finished ½ length behind the winner, or perhaps a tenth of a second later. Remember, this is over a distance of 1 ¼ miles. The winner, Giacomo, will have his name entered into any number of books and lists, it will be plastered on more mint julep glasses than one can count, and it will be on the back of more t-shirts than anyone would care to imagine. Conversely, the second place horse, Closing Argument, will not even become the answer to a trivia question. I defy anyone to tell me the name of the horse that finished third.

So, Giacomo was not light years ahead of his competition; he performed that small marginal bit better, one-tenth of a second out of a total of 122 seconds. The statisticians will tell you what that difference in percent is. What I will tell you is that this infinitesimally small difference, clearly far less than 1%, was worth more than a million dollars. The first-place share of the purse was more than $1.6 million, the second-place share, $400,000. Consider that: more than four times the reward for a performance that was less than one-tenth of 1% better. Standing out from the crowd need not occur with a great distance between you and the crowd. It needs to occur only with some-any-distance between you and the crowd. Ask Giacomo's owner.

But how do we get there? How does each of us, pretty much unremarkable people, find that one-tenth of a second?

The edge comes from commitment, a topic we've seen more than a few times in the Navy. It's one of our core values. You will get what you are committed to, that's evident. Just be aware: a commitment to anything less than excellence is acceptance of the ordinary.

Such commitment is not, I grant you, easy to manufacture. It exists when three circumstances coincide, and the three circumstances are within the grasp of each of us.

The first circumstance is to believe in your mission, to have a real stake in it. No one can excel at an activity not in tune with his or her fundamental values. Some things are more important to us than are others. Some people have jobs they perform to get through the day and cannot wait for Friday. Others are involved in a genuine undertaking in which they have a stake. You cannot be among the best at something about which you are indifferent. You're not going to put in that extra effort for something you don't care about. We have a tremendous variety of ways we can spend our duty time. Life's too short to spend time at something you don't like. Find where you want to be in the Navy, and go there. God did not write any roles for extras; each of us has a real part to play, we just need to know which role to audition for. Once you've decided what that particular role is, you need to learn the lines-the second circumstance.

Learning the lines means knowing what you are doing. And you have to be committed to it. Navy people have talked about education, training, mentoring, and leadership in these pages and in the Fleet ad infinitum. Much to our credit, the opportunities are now greater than ever, and the standards are higher. Before long it will take a bachelor's degree to make senior chief, and we've just started a new leadership training program. So, the opportunities are there. The commitment to taking advantage of these opportunities, however, resides in the individual.

Study. Ask questions. Learn something from the answers. I've yet to run into a master chief who wouldn't take a few minutes for a sailor who asked him how to get into khakis a little bit more quickly. I've yet to go to a school or a training class and come away not having learned a thing. Exposure to those with different experiences from yours is one of the best means of education around, if only you keep your eyes and ears open. There are so many opportunities to learn that there's not enough time to take advantage of them all. And of course, you don't have to. Remember that one-tenth of a second. It doesn't need to involve blood, sweat, or tears-maybe just a little reading. Or maybe just another coat of polish on the shoes or another few minutes with The Bluejacket's Manual before turning to. Making habits of any of the above will have you moving away from the pack pretty quickly, I guarantee it, if only because too many people find it too much of a bother. You don't need to be an international authority or the Sailor of the Year, you just need that one-tenth of a second.

Third, the individual pursuing excellence has to believe, really believe, that he or she is capable of it. One needs a healthy sense of self-esteem, and it comes, of course, from competence-from having done something well and knowing that you've done it well. How can you respect yourself if you doubt yourself, if you've never been tested? Steel gets stronger after it's been in the forge. Success breeds more success. Those who do have this confidence (and it's worth noting that they are the ones who are the most unassuming and tell you the least about how great they are) positively radiate it. These folks are the real leaders among us, the people you line up behind to follow. Their attitude is based on something, and it's having been there before, wherever "there" is, and having come through it just fine. They have, to borrow author Tom Wolfe's phrase, "The Right Stuff." And you can tell they have it. They knew it all along, and it shows.

We have to be careful on this last one, because the primary enemies of excellence are satisfaction with the status quo and complacency. Yes, you can pin stuff on a fellow's left pocket and tell him he's great, lead him to believe he has the stuff, but if he hasn't paid the dues, he'll never know. He'll question, and this is not a realm that allows for questioning. No one ever committed to anything in which he or she didn't have ultimate confidence.

Either way, sooner or later, (and it's usually sooner), one is going to have to show one's mettle; to have to perform and to perform with no excuses. If that person has not been through the forging process, he or she has the additional handicap of lacking that storehouse of prior successes on which to rely. Now we're no longer talking about a case of self-doubt; we're contending with something approaching a belief in measuring up short.

So let's grab a challenge or two and spend an extra few minutes doing things better than right. Let's get excited about what we're going to accomplish today. Let's get committed. Roger Bannister got committed and did what no one had done before and what medical "experts" said couldn't be done. He ran a mile in less than four minutes. Werner von Braun did what many thought impossible. He showed us not only how to put men on the moon, but how to bring them back to earth safely. Sir Isaac Newton invented a new branch of mathematics, and he told us that he didn't do it alone. He must have gone to the chiefs' mess for help, too. "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," Newton wrote in a letter in 1675.

We can do pretty much anything we believe we can do. As for myself, I choose to believe. I'm not even going to consider the possibility of anything less than excellence. I'll respect the fact that I may not yet be there, but I'll take solace in knowing that excellence is a path rather than a destination. But I will not accept less.

It's a standard we have every right to expect, and the people we serve deserve no less.

Intelligence Specialist Miller is contracted as a training consultant to JDSU (formerly JDS Uniphase), a world leader in optical technology, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. A resident of Washington, DC, he holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University and a Juris Doctorate from Cleveland State University. He describes himself as an avid golfer and frustrated musician.