Five key practices that help you strive for excellence in leadership, business, and life—without falling into the trap of perfectionism.

Some people call me a perfectionist.

I’m not. I’m an entrepreneur and a military guy, I don’t have the time to create perfect solutions.

However, I strive for excellence in everything I do. How can we improve a solution, and how can we incorporate our learnings into the next iteration? What can we learn from adversaries or competitors, and what can we do about their actions based on our actual resources? How do we pull our heads out of the sling just in time?

Excellence isn’t an obsession with my ego. Without excellence, that constant will to improve, you will neither build a successful business nor defeat an enemy.

My team (and also my family…) feel my strive for excellence every day. Whilst it can be perceived as annoying, I am convinced that a leader must push people to take the next steps, implement learning, and never lose the initiative.

If you lose the initiative in business, your competitors will push you out of the market.

If you lose the initiative in wartime, the dark forces will take over.

Excellence requires both personality and practice. I guess I was born with that strive for excellence. On an organizational level, I started practicing excellence over ten years ago, when I was leading the Kaizen efforts in the ground operations department at Swiss International Air Lines.

The following paragraphs give some insights into some elements that I practice regularly in my strive for excellence.

Element 1: Read

Whenever I have time, I read quality content from a variety of sources. My objective in reading is to find inputs for making things better. That striving for excellence kicks in again.

Filtering content is essential in today’s information space — besides the daily news, I usually read about entrepreneurship, the economy, technology, history, geopolitics, or renewable energy. I sometimes also read random stuff, helping me to discover new ideas or gain new perspectives.

Element 2: Listen and Observe

Reading is a solitary activity. But both entrepreneurs and military guys are interacting with other people all the time. For me, interacting with people provides an endless source to find out how to make things better, and how to improve. That striving for excellence kicks in again.

Just like with reading, distinguishing between signal and noise is essential when listening to people or observing a situation. Finding the signal in all that noise unearths key information. To me, identifying and using key information is the fastest and most efficient way to make things better.

Element 3: Connect the Dots

Remember, excellence is not equal to perfectionism. We need good solutions in time, not perfect solutions too late. We can always iterate later.

In my view, finding a good solution in time requires two key practices:

• Connecting the dots from different reads, conversations, and observations has often helped me come up with good solutions. Excellence hides not in the perfect solution, but in combining different inputs — sometimes from domains that wouldn’t seem relevant to a solution at first. It helps if you keep your notes from your readings and your meetings in a system that resembles your brain rather than keeping them in folders.
• In a perfect world, resources are unlimited. But remember, excellence is not equal to perfectionism. So, accept the fact that resources are limited, and find a good solution with the available resources. Don’t spend any time complaining about the lack of resources; always remember that there are people out there who can do way more than you do with way less resources than you have.

My general staff officer training has helped me very much to live up to these two key practices every day — in business as well as in private life.

Element 4: Implement

Now comes the hardest part. The good solution is ready in your head, and it needs to hit the road now.

The first thing to remember: Nearly all good solutions require team efforts. People striving for excellence need to encourage people, push people, and spread optimism that a good solution will be achievable.

The second thing to remember: There will always be setbacks. The world out there is messy, and progress is usually non-linear. Even when there are setbacks, never give up. Do whatever it takes to achieve that good solution, even if it takes more effort than anticipated, or even if your solution design needs to be adapted.

Element 5: Repeat, or Replan

I hate it, but it happens all the time. As soon as you think your solution is on track and the waters become calmer, the whole situation changes, hell breaks loose, priorities change, and people have doubts.

In the military, we call this a “new situation”. It means that the whole planning process for a solution starts again. It sucks, but it happens more often than you think, and there is no shortcut around it if you truly want to achieve excellence.

In business, better surround yourself with some military guys who are trained for “new situations”, and you’ll be fine.