I spent most part of my youth focused in training and improving my running skills. I have never considered myself a natural sprinter – I used to run 100m and 200m – and I used my preserverance and addiction to perfection as a form to be competitive.

I was never too much focused on my colleagues that raced against me, instead my focus was always on getting the best out of myself.

Although I have never reached perfection (I was quite far away from that), the attitude of seeking perfection was molded and refined over the years.

Great leaders compete with perfection rather than with others

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As a leader, I value flawless results and I care about the small details that differentiate good from great. In high performance competition there is always a very small gap (<5%) between winning and second place and that’s why if an organization wants to stand out of the norm they need to recognize that the little details make the difference in the end.

A common mistake of leaders is to focus too much on benchmarks and set standards in comparison to others. I’m not claiming that we need to ignore those insights but we should rather focus on improving constantly all of our own details in our operations and ideally operate outside and above the standards.

The constant pursuit of perfection needs to be part of the purpose of successful organizations as the society is looking always for new solutions and products. If the team members and particularly the leaders don’t have this attitude as part of their basic principles than it is difficult for an organization to stand out of the “normality”.