Excellence is essential

Published: The Hindu
On: October 03, 2012
At: Hyderabad, Chennai

To read it online, click here.

Today, excellence is a virtue that is considered an essential ingredient at work. What is excellence? Why is it so important? Are some people born with special gifts and talents that lead to excellence? Can it be inspired? Experts from industry share their insights about excellence in this two-part article.

Mr. Rohit Gadia, CEO, CapitalVia Global Research Limited says, “When a person delivers a result, which is more than expected, it leads to excellence. To deliver excellence, a strong determination must be generated in one’s mind to perform a task, since there is no substitute for hard work with smart efforts.” He further adds, “Time is changing extremely fast, technology is developing rapidly and generation is becoming advanced. Hence, there is no place for average, good and better. Everyone needs excellence since the best outcomes can be drawn with best made efforts.”

Tony Mira, Group CEO and founder Ajuba Solutions says, “In business, excellence means being conscious of your business surroundings and having the readiness to change accordingly. Change is needed to improvise on services and provide the best to customers. Any business that does not focus on excellence will find itself obsolete.” Emphasising on excellence, he says, “In today's business environment, competition is fearless. The rules have changed; organisations are not competing with competitors in their own country, but the world. Unless they demonstrate to customers that they can be faster, better and cheaper than their competition, organisations cannot survive. Excellence is the only way to achieve such results. Only through an emphasis on excellence, businesses can have more efficient operations while providing better services and results to their clients.”

Subhro Bhaduri, Executive Vice President and Head – Human Resources, Kotak Mahindra Bank says, “Excellence is the inherent desire and endeavour of an individual or a team to be aware of opportunities to improve and constantly learn and stretch to make things fundamentally better keeping in mind the impact in the short and long term. Hence, excellence is not an end goal but an ongoing opportunity to do things in a better and more efficient and inclusive manner. We are moving towards an environment of knowledge super specialisation. To achieve excellence, individuals need to be knowledgeable about the job they do and also endeavour to keep themselves updated of the latest in their fields.”

Are there any inherent skills and traits to attain excellence? K.K. Rajesh Director – Sales and Marketing, Decorative Paints, Akzo Nobel India explains, “The starting point to achieving excellence is to breed a great sense of desire to excel in oneself. This desire should then be followed up with focused actions, complete commitment and a total conviction that the path chosen is the right one. Having become proficient in the area to excel, the gap between excelling and achieving excellence is about the ability to do the same thing at the same level over and over again so that it becomes a habit.”

Subhro Bhaduri considers three primary skills that every individual should exhibit to attain excellence; building in-depth working knowledge about the job and always looking at doing an end-to-end job, holding a belief that he or she can make a difference and constantly being aware of opportunities to make things better.

Excellence can set yourself and your organisation apart from the mediocre. It can lead to higher profits and higher employee morale. Are there any factors that inspire excellence? Tony Mira says, “An individual in any business, first and foremost needs to have a fire in the belly that constantly wants to excel. To continue to survive in business, individuals must compete against themselves. Unless you compete against yourself you cannot compete against your competition.”

Subhro Bhaduri, says, “The rapidly changing environment and the availability of copious information all around us makes it imperative for us to chase excellence. So, I don’t think that in the new information age, there is a requirement of any external or internal stimulus to inspire an individual to chase for excellence, but excellence is the new norm of this age. It should become a part of life for everyone if they don’t want to be left behind.”

As K.K. Rajesh sums it up, “Excellence is about the highest quality of proficiency in a chosen field, and requires a combination of will power, smart planning, ruthless execution and the humility to make it a habit. While the reason chosen to achieve excellence may be external (competition, winning in sports, and so on), a big driver for excellence comes from within. While excellence may manifest itself physically, it originates from the heart and the mind, always!”

Let us see how to recognise people with eagerness to excel and gather some tips on achieving excellence, in the concluding part of this article.