You can't be good at everything.

Just finished reading Frances Frei's book Uncommon Service.  It's an older book, but I was lucky enough to see her talk at a conference earlier this year. She's one of those whip smart people that can weave a compelling story holding genuine insights, delivered with deft humor. I think there's a TED talk with her floating around too.

Her main point made in both the talk and in the book is that great companies tend to make explicit choices on what to excel at, and what not to. Failing to optimize for some things essentially means optimizing for all things - jack of all trades, master at none. 

We all know of one - Apple - that deliberately eschews the mediocrity of the middle ground, delivering uncompromising excellence through laser focus on what is most important and what isn't. Their products have limited model ranges, they drop things like DVD drives in the pursuit of lighter laptops, they pursue new features without always upgrading legacy products. Consumers might miss some features, but the pursuit of their strategy means making difficult trade-offs.

It's a compelling story, and she punctuates it with many outstanding examples. It's a bit of a tough pill to swallow but is basic common sense in both the micro (self) and the macro (team/organisation).  Making a very deliberate trade-off on what to excel at the expense of something else is not something that sits easily with most companies, teams, or in fact, individuals. Recommended.