The Myth of Excellence: Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: By Fred Crawford and Ryan Matthews - Brief Article

The Myth of Excellence: Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything. By Fred Crawford and Ryan Matthews. Crown Business, 252 pages. $27.50.

We've had a couple of decades' worth of books and speeches extolling the importance of excellence, with Tom Peters' and Robert Waterman's In Search of Excellence imprinting the idea on virtually every senior manager in America. Now come a pair of authors ready and willing to debunk a bedrock tenet of corporate management.

Crawford and Matthews argue that companies have gone overboard on the quest for excellence, especially its notion that a corporation should seek to be great at everything it does. In striving for that goal, they write, companies attach too much value to things that should matter less. "The predictable outcome is that the company ends up world-class at nothing: not well-differentiated and therefore not thought of by consumers at...