Dave Barry: Excellence
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In Search of Excellence
By Dave Barry
Excellence is THE trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping-mall bookstore,
go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as "Garfield Gets Spayed,"
and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: "In Search
of Excellence," "Finding Excellence," "Grasping Hold of Excellence," "Where to
Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It," etc.
The message of these books is that, here in the '80s, "good" is no longer
good enough. In today's business environment, "good" is a word we use to
describe an employee whom we are about to transfer to a urinal-storage facility
in the Aleutian Islands. What we want, in our '80s business executive, is
somebody who demands the best in everything; somebody who is never satisfied;
somebody who, if he had been in charge of decorating the Sistine Chapel, would
have said: "That is a good fresco, Michelangelo, but I want a better fresco,
and I want it by tomorrow morning."
This is the kind of thinking that now propels your top corporations. Take the
folks at Coca-Cola. For many years, they were content to sit back and make the
same old carbonated beverage. It was a good beverage, no question about it;
generations of people had grown up drinking it and doing the experiment in
sixth grade where you put a nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of
days the nail dissolves and the teacher says: "Imagine what it does to your
TEETH!" So Coca-Cola was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management
saw no need to improve.
But then along came Pepsi, with the bold new marketing concept of saying that
its carbonated beverage was better, a claim that Pepsi backed up by paying 19
trillion dollars to Michael Jackson, the most excellent musical genius of all
time according to a cover story in Newsweek magazine. And so the folks at
Coca-Cola suddenly woke up and realized that, hey, these are the '80s, so they
got off their butts and improved Coke by letting it sit out in vats in the hot
sun and adding six or eight thousand tons of sugar, the exact amount being a
trade secret.
Unfortunately, the general public, having failed to read the market surveys
proving that the new Coke was better, refused to drink it, but that is not the
point. The point is, the Coke executives decided to strive for excellence, and
the result is that the American consumer is now benefiting from the most
vicious carbonated-beverage marketing war in history. It wouldn't surprise me
if, very soon, one side or the other offered to pay $29 trillion to Bruce
Springsteen, who according to a Newsweek magazine cover story is currently the
most excellent musical genius of all time, preceded briefly by Prince.
This striving for excellence extends into people's personal lives as well.
When '80s people buy something, they buy the best one, as determined by (1)
price and (2) lack of availability. Eighties people buy imported dental floss.
They buy gourmet baking soda. If an '80s couple goes to a restaurant where they
have made a reservation three weeks in advance, and they are informed that
their table is available, they stalk out immediately, because they know it is
not an excellent restaurant. If it were, it would have an enormous crowd of
excellence-oriented people like themselves, waiting, their beepers going off
like crickets in the night. An excellent restaurant wouldn't have a table ready
immediately for anybody below the rank of Liza Minnelli.
An excellence-oriented '80s male does not wear a regular watch. He wears a
Rolex watch, because it weighs nearly six pounds and is advertised only in
excellence-oriented publications such as Fortune and Rich Protestant Golfer
Magazine. The advertisements are written in incomplete sentences, which is how
advertising copywriters denote excellence:
"The Rolex Hyperion. An elegant new standard in quality excellence and
discriminating handcraftsmanship. For the individual who is truly able to
discriminate with regard to excellent quality standards of crafting things by
hand. Fabricated of 100 percent 24-karat gold. No watch parts or anything. Just
a great big chunk on your wrist. Truly a timeless statement. For the
individual who is very secure. Who doesn't need to be reminded all the time
that he is very successful. Much more successful than the people who laughed at
him in high school. Because of his acne. People who are probably nowhere near
as successful as he is now. Maybe he'll go to his 20th reunion, and they'll see
his Rolex Hyperion. Hahahahahahahahaha."
Nobody is excused from the excellence trend. Babies are not excused. Starting
right after they get out of the womb, modern babies are exposed to
instructional flashcards designed to make them the best babies they can
possibly be, so they can get into today's competitive preschools. Your '80s
baby sees so many flashcards that he never gets an unobstructed view of his
parents' faces. As an adult, he'll carry around a little wallet card that says
"7 X 9 equals 63," because it will remind him of Mother.
I recently saw a videotape of people who were teaching their babies while
they (the babies) were still in the womb. I swear I am not making this up. A
group of pregnant couples sat in a circle, and, under the direction of an
Expert in These Matters, they crooned instructional songs in the direction of
the women's stomachs.
Mark my words: We will reach the point, in our lifetimes, where babies emerge
from their mothers fully prepared to assume entry-level management positions.
I'm sure I'm not the only person who has noticed, just wandering around the
shopping mall, that more and more babies, the really brand-new, modern ones,
tend to resemble Lee Iacocca.