The High Cost of Low Standards
Tolerance is the silent assassin of business excellence. Not the “diversity is our strength” kind, but the kind that whispers, “This is fine,” as mediocrity creeps into your operations like a slow poison. It’s the tolerance that allows subpar work to slide by, excuses a lackluster employee’s repeated misses, or approves a product that’s “good enough” but nowhere near great. Every time you make peace with mediocrity, you’re not just tolerating it — you’re endorsing it. Worse, you’re building a culture around it.
Your business will not rise above the standards you accept. It will sink to their level, dragging your reputation, morale, and bottom line down with it.
Let’s call it what it is: laziness dressed up as pragmatism. “We don’t have the resources to fix this right now.” “He’s not the best, but he gets the job done.” “The client probably won’t notice.” These excuses sound benign, even responsible. But each is a compromise — a chink in the armor that leads to a death spiral of complacency.
Mediocrity Begets Mediocrity
Imagine a company that tolerates sloppy code from its engineers. That code goes live, and customers start encountering glitches. Customer service is overwhelmed, burning out your reps, while your engineers spend days patching bugs instead of building features. Meanwhile, those same engineers see their shoddy work pass without consequences, so why should they care about doing better?
Now scale that scenario across every department — sales cutting corners, marketing spinning unremarkable campaigns, leadership turning a blind eye — and you’ve built a mediocrity machine.
Mediocrity isn’t just a performance issue; it’s an identity crisis. The work you allow defines your company’s DNA. Tolerating “okay” work breeds more “okay” work. That culture seeps into your hiring, retention, and innovation — or lack thereof.
Excellence Requires Intolerance
Now let’s flip the script. The best companies are intolerant — ruthlessly so — of anything less than great. Consider Jason Fried and Basecamp. For years, Fried and his team obsessed over simplifying the product’s interface. If new users couldn’t master it without a manual, it wasn’t good enough. That level of obsession wasn’t just about UX; it was a declaration of values. Basecamp would not tolerate complexity masquerading as innovation.
Or take Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx. Early in her career, she personally tested every prototype, refusing to ship products that didn’t meet her exacting standards. Retailers pressured her for faster deliveries, but Blakely’s response was essentially, “Your timeline is irrelevant. My standards aren’t negotiable.” Today, Spanx isn’t just shapewear — it’s a billion-dollar brand built on uncompromising quality.
These founders didn’t see their behavior as perfectionism. It was purpose-driven intolerance. Their refusal to accept “fine” when “excellent” was possible became their competitive edge.
The Leadership Tax
Here’s the catch: enforcing excellence is exhausting. It’s easier to tolerate mediocrity, to let the small stuff slide, to say, “This isn’t a hill worth dying on.” But every compromise chips away at your credibility as a leader.
Your team is always watching. If you tolerate one bad hire, they’ll assume you’ll tolerate another. If you let a subpar project pass, they’ll lower their standards accordingly. Leadership, at its core, is about modeling the behavior you want to see.
Being intolerant of mediocrity means being relentless. It means revisiting processes that aren’t working, confronting underperformers, and constantly asking, “Is this the best we can do?” It’s thankless, time-consuming, and sometimes feels like a game of Whac-A-Mole. But it’s also the price of greatness.
The Illusion of Speed
The tolerance trap often masquerades as speed. “We need to move fast,” you tell yourself. But fast and sloppy is not fast; it’s slow in disguise. Every bug you release, every poorly trained hire you onboard, every half-baked idea you launch will come back to haunt you. The time you save today will be spent tenfold cleaning up the mess tomorrow.
Apple didn’t become Apple by tolerating mediocrity. Steve Jobs was famously brutal about details, from the fonts on the first Macintosh to the angle of the corners on the iPhone. That level of intolerance wasn’t just obsessive — it was strategic. Jobs understood that customers don’t judge your business by your intentions; they judge it by your output.
And no, you don’t need to be a Steve Jobs or a Sara Blakely to build a culture of excellence. But you do need to have the courage to say “no” more than you say “yes.”
The Path to Intolerance
If your business feels stuck in a rut of “good enough,” here’s the hard truth: it’s because you’ve tolerated it. The good news? You can change it.
- Audit Your Standards: Take a long, hard look at what you’ve been tolerating — subpar work, bad hires, broken processes — and ask yourself why.
- Communicate Expectations: Excellence starts with clarity. If your team doesn’t know what “great” looks like, they’ll aim for “okay.”
- Invest in Training: Often, mediocrity is a symptom of poor tools or insufficient skills. Give your team the resources to do their best work.
- Cut Dead Weight: There’s no polite way to say this: some people need to go. Tolerating mediocrity in your workforce is a surefire way to demoralize your high performers.
- Celebrate Excellence: Reward the people who refuse to compromise. Make intolerance for mediocrity part of your company’s culture.
Intolerance as a Competitive Edge
In the end, your business will only be as good as what you demand of it. Tolerance feels safe — it avoids conflict, saves time, and keeps everyone comfortable. But comfort is the enemy of progress.
The companies, leaders, and brands we admire don’t tolerate mediocrity. They fight it, every day, in every detail. That’s the price of excellence.
So, the next time you’re tempted to let something slide, ask yourself: Is this the standard I want to be known for? Because what you tolerate today is the business you’ll inherit tomorrow.
