With all the talk about excellence in our society, there has been very littlediscussion of the difference between Excellence and "Excellence.""Excellence" means having the appearance of excellence, talking about it,demanding it of others. It does not, unfortunately, necessarily entail actually achievingexcellence oneself. In fact, it’s the most widely used substitute for achievingexcellence. Excellence is hard work, and many people just don’t have the nativeability to achieve it despite their best efforts (though you have to salute the ones whotry). "Excellence", on the other hand, is easy: be seen reading In search ofExcellence or Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, be willing to spendmoney on an Armani suit rather than buy something off the rack and use the savings forsomething useful, buy Perrier because your taste is too refined for the tap, and so on.Excellence requires effort, "Excellence" generally requires only a willingnessto spend time and money on appearances.
Be very clear on the meanings: Excellence is a positive term, "Excellence" isnot.
The bizarre antics of astro-nut Lisa Nowak, who was arrested for stalking and attacking a rival for her lover's affections in 2007, had a lot of people wondering how anyone so unstable could become an astronaut. Actually, the space program offers some interesting insights into the difference between Excellence and "Excellence."
The acceptance rate for astronaut candidates is only a few per cent. Are we to believe that the rejected candidates are incapable of performing capably as astronauts? Hardly. Completely unqualified applicants get a nice rejection letter early on. Those that make it to the final screening process are highly qualified. But there are far more of these people than can actually be sent into space, so instead of drawing lots (a practice that would probably be more beneficial to the space program, as we shall see), NASA resorts to ever more restrictive acceptance criteria. The unfortunate side effect is that accepted candidates may get a completely inflated and exalted view of their qualifications when, in fact, their acceptance is due to luck as much as anything else. Another day, a bit of a cold, or a bad night's sleep, and they might very well not have made the cut.
Astronaut James Irwin got a lot of attention for leading several expeditions to Mount Ararat in search of Noah's Ark. He had a master's degree in Aeronautical Engineering and a number of honorary degrees for his flight on Apollo 15. But he had no training in geology, history or Bible scholarship. So where did he get this grandiose idea that he was qualified enough in Bible studies, history, archaeology, or geology to ignore the consensus of Bible scholars and geologists about the nature of Noah's Flood? Even some staunchly literalist Bible encyclopedias note that the identification of the present peak with Ararat is a very recent one.
For sheer unprofessionalism in the space program, it's hard to top these anecdotes as reported by Yuri Karash in Spaceflight (May 16, 2001), describing the visit of Dennis Tito, the first commercial space tourist, to the International Space Station.
Dennis Tito received a frosty welcome from the American crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) during his sojourn in space, according to his crew members at a post-landing briefing held Tuesday in Star City, Russia.
"Having entered the station, we immediately felt that the U.S. crew members had been instructed to keep their distance from Dennis, and they followed this instruction," Soyuz commander Talgat Musabayev said at the event, held at Russia's cosmonaut training center.
"Unfortunately, some of Mir's good traditions are not observed onboard the ISS," remarked flight engineer Yuri Baturin. "When visiting crews docked to Mir, the station main crews had always asked the visitors what they would like to have for lunch or dinner, even before the hatches separating the station from Soyuz were opened. When newcomers entered the Russian station, warm food had already been waiting for them."
According to Baturin, he, Musabayev and Tito had to wait for three hours after entering the ISS for a meal. "Its too bad that even Yuri Usachev, Russian commander of the ISS, had apparently given up his traditional Russian hospitality to observe the U.S. developed rules and procedures," said Baturin.
Baturin and Musabayev took the lack of traditional welcoming bread and salt onboard the station, as one of the most eloquent signs of U.S. dominance in the outpost.
This is absolutely classic confusion of Excellence and "Excellence." Being proud of making it into the astronaut corps is justified. Thinking that making it as an astronaut is somehow superior to the way Tito made it in business (or vice versa, I might add) is pure "Excellence."
Back in the early days of space travel, there were pressing reasons to engage in ultra-rigorous screening.
Military test pilots with combat experience were the obvious choices for all three criteria, a fact that thoroughly demolishes the popular myth that women were unfairly denied admission to the early Space Program. Women were indeed subjected, unofficially, to the same medical tests as the men, but as space writer and historian James Oberg put it, no male candidate with the same flight qualifications of the best of the women would even have been given a second glance. Mere hours in a cockpit did not equal experience in combat or in high performance jets. There is no such thing as a right to go into space on someone else's rocket.
The irony is that the Russians, who did have lots of women pilots with World War II combat experience, chose for their first female cosmonaut a factory worker with minimal qualifications. Her father had been a "hero" in the Winter War against Finland, she had a proletarian background, and she was a sports parachutist. So basically she was chosen for her lack of qualifications. The Russians passed up scads of Excellent woman pilots in favor of one with Marxist "Excellent" qualifications.
Even today, astronaut training has to be rigorous, because no space flight can carry dead weight. Space flight passengers have to be able to react instinctively to emergencies and assist others. But even in the Mercury Program, the screening weeded out people who were perfectly competent. How do we know? Because they later flew Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle missions. And there were certainly many others who never flew in space who would have made perfectly fine astronauts. But we now know that 77 year old Senators can survive in space.
The bottom line in the difference between Excellence and "Excellence" is confusing luck with qualification. For every person who reaches some pinnacle, there are dozens more capable of matching that performance. Consider Jennifer Hudson, who was voted out of the finals of American Idol but then won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Dreamgirls in 2006, and by all accounts completely dominated the film. Every CEO has a hundred people waiting for him to slip so they can take his place. For every hit band there are a thousand others just as good practicing in their garages.
How many people could be President of the United States? Almost anybody if enough staffers insulate him from reality, but functionally? Well, most members of Congress, many governors, many top military officers, mayors of large cities, executives of major companies, ambassadors, presidents of major universities, lots of other academics, and those are just the plausible choices. Then there are probably a ton of unknown people who could rise to the challenge. It's by no means unlikely that there are 10,000 people at any given time who could capably serve as President. Yet during a working lifetime, perhaps ten will make it. Some will decide it's just not worth trying for, others will try and be weeded out on the campaign trail, and all but one of those actually on the ballot will lose on Election Day.
If you make it to the top couple of per cent in any field, that's talent. If you make it from there to the one in a million pinnacle, that's at least as much luck as talent.
For pompous, puffed up and pretentious posturing, "Excellence" in all its glory, it's hard to beat "professional Web designers." I put the term in quotes because as far as I can tell, there is no professionalism in Web design. For example, I stumbled across a page on Bob Bly Copywriter called "What Does Cheap Copy Cost?" in which he laments the lowball prices charged by some Web authors. On this page, by someone who considers himself a Web design professional, we have a huge title and a logo taking up the top quarter of the screen. Then we have two sidebars taking 20% of each side of the page. That makes sense up near the top but leaves a long trail of blank white space on either side at the bottom. I hit another business site that had the stupid spiral notebook design down the left side of the page.
The anathema among "Web professionals" is "commoditization," treating the vacuous art of advertising as a mere commodity instead of something approaching an art form. There are only three things that make me, as a consumer, view a commercial Web site as Excellent:
I have seen a couple of pages
One person who does get it is Vincent Flanders, whose page Web Pages That Suck
"Yes, WebPagesThatSuck.com fails to pass the checklist. The site's design has always sucked."
For sheer vapidity, you have to admire the people who get aroused by type fonts. Consider this New York Times article of April 3, 2008 in which "Brian Collins, an expert on branding," waxes rhapsodic about Barack Obama's choice of type fonts.
Do you think the typographical style actually makes a difference?
You bet I do. Style equals accuracy. Put the word “change” in Comic Sans and the idea feels lightweight and silly. Place it in Times Roman and it feels self-important. In Gotham, it feels just right. Inspiring, not threatening. In the end, typography makes a real difference when it delivers words and ideas that are relevant to people. And for many, that seems to be the case here.
Speaking of accuracy, since when do "self-important" or "inspiring, not threatening," have anything to do with accuracy?
Collins also burbled:
I was most impressed by one artifact: the signs that turn each campaign state into a logo for the Obama campaign. I’ve never seen anything quite like that before. I think it’s clever. But it also works as it makes each state feel part of a larger, national movement.
So, tingling with excitement, I visited Obama's Web site, expecting to find skillfully executed logos on each state's page in which the state outline or some distinctive emblem had been turned into a creative logo. What I actually found was that any state with an "O" in the name had the letter turned into an Obama logo, with the top half blue and the bottom half a wavy flag stripe pattern. If the state lacked an "O" then the letter "A" was used. For trouble-makers New Jersey, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee, some other letter was used. Moderately cute. Impressive? Well, if you're impressed by shiny bits of tinfoil or blinking traffic lights, maybe.
A quote from Secret Of The Sweet-Sounding Stradivarius: Wood Density Explains Sound Quality Of Great Master Violins (ScienceDaily, July 2, 2008)
Experts are fascinated by the fact that classical Cremonese violins from the famous masters such as Stradivari (1644 -- 1737) and Guarneri del Gesu (1698 -- 1744) are still unparalleled in their abilities of tonal expressiveness and projection. 300 years of technological advancement has not provided substantial improvements towards paralleling the achievements of the classical Cremonese violin makers.
Well, maybe. Now compare these quotes from Fungus-treated Violin Outdoes Stradivarius (ScienceDaily Sep. 14, 2009)
September 1st 2009 was a day of reckoning for Empa scientist Francis Schwarze and the Swiss violin maker Michael Rhonheimer. The violin they had created using wood treated with a specially selected fungus was to take part in a blind test against an instrument made in 1711 by the master violin maker of Cremona himself, Antonio Stradivarius. In the test, the British star violinist Matthew Trusler played five different instruments behind a curtain, so that the audience did not know which was being played. One of the violins Trusler played was his own strad, worth two million dollars. The other four were all made by Rhonheimer – two with fungally-treated wood, the other two with untreated wood. A jury of experts, together with the conference participants, judged the tone quality of the violins. Of the more than 180 attendees, an overwhelming number – 90 persons – felt the tone of the fungally treated violin "Opus 58" to be the best. Trusler’s Stradivarius reached second place with 39 votes, but amazingly enough 113 members of the audience thought that "Opus 58" was actually the strad! "Opus 58" is made from wood which had been treated with fungus for the longest time, nine months.
Judging the tone quality of a musical instrument in a blind test is, of course, an extremely subjective matter, since it is a question of pleasing the human senses. Empa scientist Schwarze is fully aware of this, and as he says, “There is no unambiguous scientific way of measuring tone quality.” He was therefore, understandably, rather nervous before the test. Since the beginning of the 19th century violins made by Stradivarius have been compared to instruments made by others in so called blind tests, the most serious of all probably being that organized by the BBC in 1974. In that test the world famous violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman together with the English violin dealer Charles Beare were challenged to identify blind the "Chaconne" Stradivarius made in 1725, a "Guarneri del Gesu" of 1739, a "Vuillaume" of 1846 and a modern instrument made by the English master violin maker Roland Praill. The result was rather sobering – none of the experts was able to correctly identify more than two of the four instruments, and in fact two of the jurors thought that the modern instrument was actually the "Chaconne" Stradivarius.
In the Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2009, Jerry Hirsch wrote: "Findings of wine contest study hard for critics to swallow"
Writing in the Journal of Wine Economics, retired Cal State Humboldt professor Robert Hodgson said he looked at the results for more than 4,000 wines entered in 13 U.S. competitions in 2003 and found little consistency in what wines won gold medals. The study said that of almost 2,500 wines that were entered in more than three competitions, 47% won a gold medal in at least one contest. However, of those gold medal winners, 98% were regarded as just above average or below in at least one of the other competitions. Hodgson said that demonstrated how little consistency there was. "Of the wines that entered five competitions and got at least one gold, about 75% also received no award in at least one of the remaining competitions," he said.
"How can you explain this huge discrepancy?" the professor asked. "Either the wineries are sending non-uniform samples to competitions or the judges are simply unreliable instruments for assessing quality.
Hodgson drew the ire of many wine contest organizers earlier this year when he published a four-year study of the California State Fair Wine Competition that found judges often rated the same wine differently when they tasted it twice in a blind group of wines.
The findings were dismissed as "hogwash" by the organizer of the Los Angeles County Fair's giant wine contest.
Well, of course the organizer of the wine contest considers the results hogwash. With 3600 entrants each paying $75 to enter, that's $270,000 worth of hogwash.
Let's consider a hypothesis that explains all the above observations: if "experts" cannot tell the difference between a Stradivarius and other fine violins, and cannot rate wines consistently, either the experts are not experts (more than plausible) or there is no difference in quality, not at this level, anyway. Yes, there is a difference between a Strad and a poor quality violin. Yes, there is a difference between a fine wine and a bad one. But at high levels of excellence, there is no difference, and never was, except in terms of snob appeal.
I am by no means a logical positivist, but it has one thing to recommend it. There is a universe of puffery out there that justifies itself by claiming that there are qualities too subtle to be quantified or measured. Before we accept that some concept is too high or sublime to be subject to the crassness of proof, we ought to demand that the claimant offer some evidence. Merely asserting that everyone agrees Stradivarius is the pinnacle of violin making or a certain wine is fine doesn't cut it.
Considering the space program above, Tom Wolfe wrote that military pilots have a superstition of "the right stuff," an indefinable quality that protects them from all the mishaps that can kill a pilot. The "right stuff" is indefinable because it doesn't exist. Reflexes exist. Experience exists. Judgment exists. But there is no mental attitude that will save a pilot from an unexpected catastrophic malfunction. There is a test for whether people can make the instantaneous life and death decisions needed in an emergency: put them in life and death situations and see who survives. Fortunately for NASA, there was a large contingent of candidates who had recently been through that sort of testing: aerial combat. There were plenty of other equally qualified pilots who were not available because their cockpits had jammed, their parachutes failed, or they were fatally wounded by shrapnel. No amount of "the right stuff" could have prevented it.