The Tragic Death of Kobe Bryant & His Daughter

The tragic death of Kobe Bryant and his daughter on January 26, 2020 in a helicopter crash overshadowed any and all sports news for some time and resulted in an international outpouring of grief and sadness. While Bryant had many incredible accomplishments on the court, and was, by all accounts, a devoted husband and father, one particular comment among the many made by those who knew Bryant had a great impact on me.

Arn Tellem, who was his agent during his NBA career and later became Vice Chairman of the Detroit Pistons, said this about Bryant:

“The glint in his eyes wasn’t just joy. It was sparks from a fire that couldn’t be tamped down. To him, anything less than the best was failure.”

For me, this is one of the most powerful ways to celebrate someone’s life. To have a huge desire to exhibit excellence in everything you do resonates deeply with me, and it’s very similar to what I’ve aspired to for most of my life. I’m not blessed with a fraction of the talent that Bryant had, but I’ve always burned with a desire to be the best I could be at anything I cared about.

I’ve fallen short too many times to count, and undoubtedly will continue to fall short until I die. But my personal quest for distinction will, I hope, never fade.

This is one way to view a passion for excellence.

Passion defines the spirit that Kobe Bryant displayed almost every night in a long NBA career. Bryant played for 19 seasons, including 1,346 regular season games and 220 playoff games.

When you step back and consider that in its totality, it is almost impossible to believe that an individual can bring that kind of effort and desire to his chosen profession on a consistent, even constant basis.

Far too often, the passion we see around the world today is either absent or dissipated in unproductive ways. For those of us who care deeply about manufacturing, the absence of passion is something that troubles me, particularly as I reach the final decades of my life.

This calls to mind situations I’ve observed over a very long career.

Too often, great companies fall into a hole, a hole that is hard to escape, because they lose their thirst for excellence. This happens in a number of different ways, but it always seems to relate to something I learned studying the work of Dr. W.E. Deming, a man known as a world-changing expert on quality issues, and a man who helped build the foundation of the Third Wave of the Industrial Revolution.

The Third Wave is seen as spanning the period from the late 1940’s to the first decade of the 21st century. It can be argued that the Third Wave built the world we live in today and has paved the way for the Fourth Wave which is now underway.

The key elements of the Third Wave included wide dispersion of digital technology and computational power at both large and small scales. All of this would have been far less likely if the consistency and quality of manufactured products did not reach levels that are simply not possible via individual craftsmanship. And, most importantly for this discussion, that level of quality was usually driven by a ceaseless effort to improve every day.

Most LinkedIn members have heard the term “continuous improvement.”

Deming, though, disliked that expression. As he explained, continuous improvement means going from point A to point B without interruption. But Deming pointed out that getting to point B and stopping is all too common.

Instead, Deming advocated for “continual improvement.” Continual improvement moves from point A to infinity—it never stops. While this may appear to be a fine semantic difference, it is not; it is something far more difficult to do and, once you spend a lot of time working toward that end—as I have—you find it is actually a disturbing concept.

What this says is that you are never good enough, no matter what you’ve done previously. That’s not easy to get your head around, and, at the very least, can be exhausting. Waking up every day and feeling some degree of inadequacy is unsettling at best and can be debilitating if you allow that emotional discovery to generate feelings of negativity.

We all want to reach a goal and celebrate that accomplishment.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but the world waits for no one. If you lose sight of the need to improve, or you decide to take an easy path or shortcut, someone somewhere will try and eat your lunch—or worse.

That’s why Bryant’s career is so astounding. Bryant, in his last game, scored 60 points, including 23 in the fourth quarter, to lead his L.A. Laker team to victory. Never good enough, indeed.

I’ve frequently seen this first-hand in business.

Three examples stand out. First, the US automotive industry, from the mid 1960’s until the early years of the 21st century, thought they were good enough and didn’t need to get better. “It’s good enough” was an idea I lived with (and hated) for many years as an engineer in that industry. Extra effort to reach greatness wasn’t just lacking, it was openly derided.

The second is Boeing’s 737 Max disaster and the window plug blow out that has followed the original 737 mess. I owned a business that was a Boeing supplier in the 1990’s and it was a transcendent experience; they wanted to be outstanding in almost every way imaginable. Somehow, somewhere, they decided to take an easier route in the past few years, and, as most accounts confirm, they cut corners and were no longer reaching for excellence—they were looking for an easy triumph and fast money.

The final case is the Volkswagen “Dieselgate” problem, a problem that has cost VW in excess of $30 billion, a number that stretches my mind beyond its limits. I was involved in the early stages of this disaster as a consultant, and although I can’t divulge everything I know due to professional confidentiality, the underlying issue was a set of senior management decisions that literally ignored basic physical laws and demanded a rapid, no-cost way to overcome the inherent limitations of Diesel cycle engines. I saw this and advised VW management that they were headed down a very nasty route, and I was rewarded by having my consulting engagement cancelled. A decade later, the convoluted effort used to get around basic physics was revealed, and the outcome was beyond terrible, wrecking careers, generating massive amounts of climate-changing pollution, and costing VW dearly. I was utterly stunned by the details of what Volkswagen had done, but the earlier behavior of management was the first step down the path that ended so badly.

Finally, I can offer a counterexample that is almost equally remarkable.

Starting more than 20 years ago, I spent considerable time doing consulting work with Kia Motors in Korea. I poured my soul into that work, but the response of Kia’s people was, eventually, even more passionate than my efforts. At that point in time, Kia had just emerged from bankruptcy, and rival Hyundai had effectively bailed Kia out by purchasing a 50% interest in Kia.

The vehicles Kia produced when I started on that project were substandard in many ways. In fact, an inside joke in the US auto industry was that “Kia” stood for “Killed In Action,” a term that originated in the US during the Vietnam war to describe casualties in that conflict. A warrior that died on the field was referred to as KIA, a contrast to MIA, or “Missing In Action.”

Early on in the engagement, I had to make the Kia team realize that the vehicle quality they were used to, a quality level that satisfied local Korean preferences at that time, was not adequate for the rest of the world. As many would believe, they felt that if it was good enough for Koreans—a very proud nation with a 5,000-year written history—then the rest of the world would see it that way, too.

But they recognized that market research revealed that the view of Kia in the US, and in other parts of the world, was dismal at best. So, they looked to our consulting team to help them “become like Toyota.”

I felt that was a poor target. Instead, I suggested that they should work to a future where Toyota would want to “become like Kia.” While I don’t take credit for all of the things that Kia has done in the intervening 20 plus years, I do think that Kia’s people and their senior managers clearly absorbed what continual (rather than continuous) improvement really means. Each generation of their vehicles is a meaningful improvement on the previous generation and their cycle time for new vehicles is equal to or superior to almost any other automaker on the planet.

And they’ve been rewarded with a market share which has grown from miniscule to more than 3.6% worldwide in 2021, one-third of the market share of world-leader Toyota and larger than either Mercedes-Benz or BMW. That’s about 2.8 million vehicles, and most analysts are predicting that Kia will continue to grow strongly in the next 3 years. Have they reached the goal of having Toyota envy Kia? Not yet—but I see no signs that they are relaxing, levelling off, or pausing in their quest for excellence.

So, I suggest you start each day by asking yourself a question.

What will I do today to be better than I was yesterday? And how can I translate that into a better outcome for my organization or my business?

A passion for continual improvement is a hard habit to establish and even harder to maintain.

It seems, though, to be the key to excellence.

This article is based on a column I penned, as my alter ego An Old Dog in Texas, for the Tech Hockey Guide (THG), a website devoted to the Michigan Tech Huskies’ hockey program (THG is not affiliated directly with the University). You can read the original—with the references to the Huskies and college hockey—here.