One of my favorite recent books is The Excellence Dividend by Tom Peters. It starts, “Excellence, always. If not excellence, what? If not excellence now, when?”
During a recent dinner meeting, an emeritus board member remarked on moving to Kosciusko County many years ago, “success is expected here.” By success, I took to mean that he was referring to excellence.
In recent weeks, three community members have been recognized for their contributions toward excellence:
- Maple Leaf Farms CEO Terry Tucker was presented with the 2019 AgriVision Award (Link)
- Lake Wawasee resident Dr. George Rapp received the 2019 Sachem Award from Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb (Link)
- Warsaw Mayor Joe Thallemer was elected 2020 president of the Association of Indiana Municipalities (Link)
These honors come in recognition of decades of service and speak to the opportunities for each of us to pursue excellence in our own way. Three additional points from Tom Peters:
- Excellence is not a metric. It is a state of mind, a way of being.
- Excellence is a way of life that sustains us and inspires us day in and day out, minute in and minute out.
- The manifestation of excellence – or not – in our moment-to-moment behavior is the bedrock beneath the bedrock.
As we move into the autumn of 2019, let’s “do the best we can right now” to pursue excellence, which as Peters also shares, means “caring more, risking more, dreaming more, and expecting more.”
– Alan Tio
