“Adequacy is sufficient” – but it’s never going to make you proud
November 2nd, 2011
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs. Jobs’ desire (bordering on compulsion) to produce the very highest quality products warms my heart. Admittedly, he sounds like he was an incredibly difficult person to be around a lot of the time, and you’d have needed to be able to adopt a water-off-a-duck’s back approach to a lot of his outbursts, but I admire the fact that he allowed his intuition to tell him when something wasn’t right and he just wasn’t prepared to settle for second best.
Take the following quote:
At the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1981 … Adam Osborne released the first truly portable personal computer. It was not great – it had a five-inch screen and not much memory – but it worked well enough. As Osborne famously declared, "Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous." Jobs found that approach to be morally appalling …
Like Jobs, I find the “adequacy is sufficient” attitude appalling (though I’m not sure about morally appalling). It reminds me of the tenet of the Agile development methodology that you should aim to deliver goods and services that are “just barely good enough”. If a product is good enough to ship and be accepted by the customer then it’s good enough, and any effort expended on trying to make it better than that, in your opinion, is simply an opportunity cost – that is, you could have spent that time profitably on other paid work.
Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, claimed that the perfect racing car would fall to pieces as soon as it crossed the finish line to win a race. If it didn’t it just showed that it was over engineered. Of course this was hyperbole. Chapman was exaggerating to make a point. You only need to look at those beautiful Lotus racing cars he designed to realise that they were engineered for more than merely crossing the finishing line first.
I became a convert to the Agile methodology a few years back and I still believe it’s got a lot to offer. For a while I tried to convince myself that aiming to deliver “barely good enough” was the way to go, but it always rankled with me. These days I find the idea repugnant. To me it represents one of the worst aspects of the business world: the short-termist approach of “let’s just ship whatever we can manage to persuade the customer to accept and involves the least possible work for us”. It’s an accountant’s balance sheet view of product management: the smallest possible number in red that gives the biggest possible number in blue – maximise the credits, minimise the debits, and ship whatever whatever we can get away with. This kind of thinking will get you sales but it will not get you repeat business and it’s not a recipe for success (by which I mean growing numbers of happy customers and happy staff).
Steve Jobs had the signatures of the Macintosh team moulded on the inside of the cases of the original Apple Macs. That’s right: the inside – and you couldn’t even open the case to see this. Why did he do this? Well imagine how you’d feel if yours was one of those names! For all the berating and bawling out he did, imagine the team-bonding, morale-boosting effect of having your name moulded into the first Apple Mac. Wouldn’t you want to produce the best computer in the world if you knew your signature was on it. (If the answer to that question is no then you would never have been employed as part of that team.)
Jobs also fretted over the exact colour of the case, insisted on rounded corners for dialog boxes, obsessed over the choice of system fonts – things that the majority of buyers wouldn’t consciously even notice and wouldn’t really care about even if their attention was drawn to it. But Jobs noticed, and he cared about these things and he wanted to produce a product that he could be genuinely proud of. To an extent he was doing it for himself. He was designing the computer he wanted to own. And he continued doing this with hardware products (Apple software is another story altogether) for the rest of his life.
The point is that I increasingly feel, for our own self-respect and self-regard, we should always try to do the very best work we are capable of. Adopting the “adequacy is sufficient” attitude, or believing that “just barely good enough” should be the height of your aspirations, inevitably leads to a feeling that all you need to do is the minimum you need to do to avoid getting the sack so that you can continue collecting your pay cheque. The accountancy ethos rubs off: minimum personal outlay for maximum financial income.
For me that’s not enough. Just barely good enough is never going to be enough. It’s laziness. It’s a lazy, unambitious, unimaginative outlook on life that I want no part of – and I don’t want to have to work with people who think that way either. I want to aim to do work that is every bit as good as I can make it – whether or not anybody else ever notices. Personally, a good day for me is when I end the day feeling like I’ve done something I can be proud of.
Potentially similar posts
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- Remembering my first computer – April 2010
- What makes Steve Jobs an irresistible leader? – February 2010


