In the corporate world

In the corporate world you often have to work very very hard at things which do not really seem to be of much use: e.g. spend hours and hours late at night on Powerpoint to make things look absolutely stunning and perfect, or looking for tiny errors in Excel calculations.

One may then ask: "aren't these things adding very little value to your work?" The answer, from an objective standpoint, is yes. Your work would be 90% fine after the first 50% of time, then the remaining 50% of time is fine-tuning, checking for errors, perfecting things and so on.

So yes, working harder and harder does definitely lead to diminishing returns. Why work so damn hard then, you may ask.

The answer is that in our society today, it is more and more often winner-takes-all. Say five companies bid for a project. Only one will get it, and all the associated revenue. Or five people go for a elite job offer - only one will get it too. So every little bit that could POSSIBLY put you on top, you must do it. In the old times if you were a farmer, you harvested a little slower than your neighbors, no big deal, you got a little less crops. Now you execute a little slower than your competitors, sorry, no project for you. The revenue is zero. Same with establishing a brand, the winner in the market battle reaps gigantic gains.

Do these little things like, say, Powerpoint font size count? The real answer is we don't know. However they may, so we have to make sure everything is perfect since lots of money is riding on the line.

The outcome of a deal may well be decided not by Powerpoint font size but by the relationships the senior management has with the clients, maybe he hit the client while drunk. Or maybe we bribed the wrong guy.

But no one likes to talk about such things affecting outcomes, so in the corporate world we all pretend that it's perfection that counts and if you get a small detail wrong, sorry!

The fault is on you, even though it's probably not your fault the deal is gone.

That's why we have to spend that 50% of time getting the last 10% right.