I’ve made it my mission to help individuals and organizations perform excellently.
That might sound a little funny, and that’s okay. What does it even mean to perform excellently anyway (or, for grammar’s sake, with excellence)? Well, it’s not what you might think. In fact, it’s far more complicated than it sounds.
My academic background is in philosophy, and one of the most famous philosophers every student reads is Aristotle. As you might imagine, Aristotle was a pretty smart guy, and he - like every other philosopher - was concerned with an important question: What does it mean to lead a good life?
One of the conclusions Aristotle reached combined the concept of excellence with what he called virtue. In the eyes of Aristotle, living well - leading a good life - can be accomplished by acting excellently in all human activity. That includes excellence of character, or virtue, and to be virtuous, you must continually do excellent things.
The concept of work, of pursuing a career, is a uniquely human activity, but it’s one that is fraught with challenges.
I’ve always wanted to build environments in which people enjoy coming to work. But we often forget that work is human.
- Ryan Stelzer
I consistently hear and observe how work - a distinctly human activity - has become overly quantitative; about how qualitative excellence has been supplanted by quantitative importance. In short, numbers matter more than people.
So, instead of a company asking: “How much money can we save this year?” I encourage businesses to instead consider questions like: “How can we improve upon the product we made last year?” or “How can we innovate something new?”
This simple rephrasing empowers employees and organizations to behave - or to begin to behave - with excellence of character. It enables them to deploy virtue as a means of flourishing instead of a hinderance.
To act with virtue, Aristotle says, a person must always do the right thing, at the appropriate time, in the correct way. Imagine if every company could say that about each and every one of their employees. And, not impossibly, imagine if every employee could say that about each and every one of their companies.