An "Excellent" Sign

As I was driving to our family's weekly Sunday dinner, I passed a sign on the side of the road. The kind of sign with the changeable letters that always has a clever message on it. We drove by too fast for me to get a picture, but on it was the message:

Excellence - Doing something common in an uncommon way

At first, I looked at it and thought, "All right, inspiring". But then after thinking about it - I'm not sure I agree with it. Do you think they put the "Excellent" message up in an uncommon way just to prove their point? I don't think standing on milk crates stacked on a hammock while placing the letters on the sign with a pair of tweezers would have any bearing on the effectiveness of the message. In fact, the most common way of putting the message on the sign is probably the best.

I liked wikipedia's definition of "Excellence" the best, so I'll use it.

Excellence is the state or quality of excelling. It is superiority, or the state of being good to a high degree. Excellence is considered to be a value by many organizations, in particular by schools and other institutions of education, and a goal to be pursued.

So, "Excellence" is the state of being superior. It doesn't say anything about the way in which this superiority is achieved. This is where I have a problem with the first message. I think you can be excellent, do excellent work, and have an excellent product in a common(usual) way.

Now, I'm not saying that it's bad to do something in an uncommon way - that's how we get better. To solve a complex problem sometimes takes some creativity and doing something that no one else has done before - it's called innovation. What I am saying is that that this does not equal excellence. I believe that you can have excellence without innovation (since I already used that word), but it's a lot harder to achieve innovation without excellence - that's the challenge.

Although it's usually involved, Sunday dinner was excellent, done the same old way as always.