Two famous authors were chatting at a glamorous party on New York’s Shelter Island – Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller (of Catch-22 fame).
Vonnegut tells Heller that the party’s host, a billionaire hedge fund manager, once made more money in a single day than Heller made from all the Catch-22 royalties across the novel’s entire lifespan.
“Yes,” said Heller, “but I have something he will never have… Enough.”
Boom. A real zinger, that one.
Because it’s true. And a lot harder to achieve than it sounds.
Any time a team or a business gets some wind in its sails and builds some momentum with a certain process, product, or principle, it also faces the temptation of going too far.
Doing more of the same is easy. It’s self-reinforcing. But it can also be a trap.
Think of the comedian telling edgy jokes, getting laughs, going edgier and edgier, getting bigger laughs, feeling like he’s on a roll, and then going that one extra step that he’ll be apologizing for the next five years. The same thing happens to companies and cultures.
Meta keeps finding new ways to extract data and target ads – each iteration more invasive than the last. The shareholders may be happy, but is anyone using their products happier than they were five years ago?
Real leaders have the discipline to ask, “This worked for us before. Is it still the right move now?” They know when to articulate a limiting principle.
They know when to say “enough.”
Most companies never get that option. But the ones who do? They’ve figured out the only game worth winning.
