Good Enough Archives - Page 3 of 5

Close Enough

Close enough for government work. It is not worth spending more time to perfect this. The phrase appears in print in 1962, in NASA reports on the first American orbital flights.

Close enough for jazz. This is the musicians’ version. It has been in print since at least 1937. That year Billboard printed it as a stock musicians’ joke, said after the saxophones tune up.

Good enough for who it’s for. The job was not done perfectly, but it was done well enough for the people it was done for.

Wiktionary labels the government phrase “humorous” and “disparaging.” A popular story says it began in World War II as praise for exacting standards. Members of the American Dialect Society searched for evidence and found “nothing to support” it.

The Ugly Duckling

Between 1941 and 1945, eighteen American shipyards built 2,710 Liberty ships. The design was chosen for its “simple, low-cost construction.” The ships were made “assembly-line style, from prefabricated sections.” Joshua Smith of the American Merchant Marine Museum notes that they were throwaway ships with a five-year life expectancy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the ship “a dreadful looking object.” Time magazine called it the “Ugly Duckling.”

Early Liberty ships suffered cracks in the hull and deck. Three Liberty ships broke in half. Some ships sailed far longer than their five-year design life.

A New Way of Doing Business

On June 29, 1994, Secretary of Defense William Perry signed a memo titled “Specifications and Standards — A New Way of Doing Business.” It made performance specifications and commercial products the default. A performance specification says what an item must do, not how to make it. Detailed military specifications were allowed only “as a last resort, with an appropriate waiver.”

A 1997 Air War College paper gave examples of what the old system cost. The military had used its own specifications to buy “dog combs, tacos, fruitcakes.” A specification for white gloves “caused one manufacturer to set up a different assembly line.” The gloves cost $32 a pair. The same manufacturer sold “nearly identical gloves commercially for $20.”

Lowest Price Technically Acceptable

Federal agencies can buy goods and services by a method called “lowest price technically acceptable.” Each proposal is checked against the stated requirements and is either acceptable or not. The Federal Acquisition Regulation says that proposals are checked for acceptability but are “not ranked using the non-cost/price factors.” It also says: “Tradeoffs are not permitted.” The cheapest acceptable offer wins, even when another offer is better.

Outside the Department of Defense, a 2018 defense law limits the method. An agency may use it only when, among other conditions, it “would realize no, or minimal, value from a proposal that exceeds the minimum technical or performance requirements.” Buyers must avoid it, as far as practicable, for services such as cybersecurity and health care, and for personal protective equipment.

Satisficing

In 1956 Herbert Simon published “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment” in Psychological Review. He wrote: “Evidently, organisms adapt well enough to ‘satisfice’; they do not, in general, ‘optimize.'”

The term joins satisfy and suffice. A person who satisfices stops searching when an option meets the need. In 1978 Simon received the Nobel Prize in economics “for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations.”

Fit for Ordinary Purposes

When a merchant sells goods, the Uniform Commercial Code adds an implied warranty that they are “merchantable.” This applies when the seller deals in goods of that kind. Section 2-314 says such goods must be “fit for the ordinary purposes for which such goods are used.”

Cornell Law School’s legal dictionary explains the standard. Merchantable goods “need not be outstanding or superior quality, they need only be fit for the ordinary purpose for which they are used.” In everyday terms, a toaster bought in a store must toast. It does not have to be the best toaster on the market.

Section 2-315 adds a separate warranty for a particular purpose. It applies only when the seller has reason to know that purpose and the buyer relies on the seller’s judgment.

Done Is Better Than Perfect

“Done is better than perfect.” Facebook painted these words on the walls of its offices. Mark Zuckerberg explained why in his letter to investors. The letter was part of the filing, dated February 1, 2012, for the company’s stock market listing. The words were there “to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.”

In the same letter he described what he called “the Hacker Way.” Hackers, he wrote, build “by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once.”

The saying is older than Facebook. It has been in print since at least 1979.

Embarrassed by Version One

“If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, posted this line on March 29, 2017. The same day he published an essay with the title “If There Aren’t Any Typos In This Essay, We Launched Too Late!”

He did not say it only once. The author Eric Ries wrote that Hoffman “often says” it.

The Reading Pipe Case

A builder put up a country house for more than $77,000. The contract called for pipe “of Reading manufacture.” Some of the pipe came from other factories. The owner refused to pay the last $3,483.46 until the pipe was replaced. The builder sued. The case, Jacob & Youngs v. Kent, was decided by the Court of Appeals of New York in 1921.

Judge Benjamin Cardozo ruled for the builder. Reading pipe differed from other brands “only by the name of the manufacturer stamped upon it.” Replacing it would cost a great deal. So the owner could claim only the difference in value, “which would be either nominal or nothing.”

The dissent said the owner “had a right to contract for what he wanted.” The majority used a different test: “We must weigh the purpose to be served.” American contract law calls the rule substantial performance.

The 80 percent solution

American military and business usage: a good plan executed now beats a perfect plan executed later. The claim is not that 80 percent is acceptable, but that the remaining 20 percent costs more in delay than it returns in quality.