The book, in progress
War on Mediocrity
I am writing it now. It is not finished, there is no publication date, and there is nothing to pre-order. This page exists so that when someone goes looking for it, they find the real thing instead of a guess.
The argument
The most common thing I have seen across every company I have run or advised is not incompetence. It is tolerance. We set outsized goals in January and then spend the year tolerating the people and the standards that make those goals impossible.
Not the disasters. The disasters get handled, because they force your hand. I mean the fives and sixes and sevens. The people who are never bad enough to act on, who quietly set the ceiling for everyone around them. They do not blow the company up. They steal its soul, one tolerated miss at a time, while everyone else watches to see whether the standard is real.
And here is the part that makes it a war rather than a purge: the problem usually is not the person. People are not fixed or fragile or lazy. They rise or fall to the level of the environment, the expectations, and the challenge around them. Which means the mediocrity in your company is mostly a reflection of what you have been willing to accept. That is a harder book to read, and it is the one worth writing.
Who it is for
Founders and CEOs who have already built something real and can feel it running at eighty percent. You are not looking for motivation. You are looking for the specific thing you have been avoiding, and the language to finally address it without blowing up the room.
If you have ever left a performance conversation relieved that it went smoothly, and known on the drive home that nothing changed, this book is about that drive home.
Where it comes from
Not research. I led five companies as the operator with the payroll on my desk, and I have advised more than a hundred B2B companies since. Every diagnostic in this book has a moment behind it where I got it wrong first, tolerated something I should not have, and paid for it. I am not writing about a trap I watched other people fall into.
The essays on this site are where a lot of this thinking gets worked out in public. If you want the argument before the book exists, start there.
When it is finished, you will hear it here first
I am not running a launch list or a countdown. When the manuscript is done, I will say so in the weekly letter before I say it anywhere else. That is the whole mechanism.
Questions
Is War on Mediocrity published yet?
No. It is being written now. There is no publication date, no publisher announcement, and nothing to pre-order. When that changes, this page changes.
What is the book about?
Tolerated mediocrity, and why it is a leadership problem rather than a people problem. Companies rarely fail because someone was catastrophically bad. They stall because the merely adequate went unaddressed for years, and everyone learned what the standard actually was.
Can I read anything now?
Yes. The essays carry most of this thinking, and Accountability Is a Learned Skill is the closest single piece to the book’s spine.
Will Jerry speak on this material?
He already does. The keynote closest to it is Creating a Culture of Accountability. See the speaking page for formats and availability.