When I was in college, I stumbled into a workstudy job in which I was the student leader of an afterschool/summer program for at-risk youth. I worked closely with the program's founder to guide the focus of the program and was pretty much left alone to handle the week to week operations. We had almost no budget; so all supplies, facilities, and activities were begged, borrowed, and stolen for. It was a great experience which taught me tons. When I was a senior, my little program got swallowed up by the College's Community Service Office. We were a heavily service-oriented school, so the CS Office wielded tons of influence and more importantly - cash.

The CS director came to me and said, "Mike - you have infinitely more resources than you've ever had and a year to plan. Think this one out. You can redefine your program and build it to what it should be, not what it has been." He was asking me to reshape the program. The actual activities weren't as important this year as the plans I was to make, for they would be the plans the program would follow in the years to come.

So I planned. And thought. And met with administrators. And planned some more. One day the director came to me furious. He said it was embarrassing to have a program that wasn't doing anything. I told him that he had said that it wasn't important that I did anything, so long as I laid solid plans for the years to come. His reply was something along the lines of "Your plans don't matter anymore. Put something - anything - together that we can slap the program's name on to so it looks like we're doing something."

I was crushed. Here was a man whose whole career was dedicated to service telling me that quality didn't matter a damn, it was quantity that mattered. I wanted to quit, but if I did I'd lose the workstudy money. So I caved. I did what he wanted. And I've regretted it ever since.

--------Fast Forward Three Years--------

My company often touts its quest for excellence. We want the highest quality. We want to constantly wow our customers; both internal and external.

Today, one of the middle managers came to me asking me to write a program that would pull data from a specific corner of the database. Fine, I told him, I can do that, but the data from that area is notoriously unreliable. I said it was probably safer to manually gather the data. "Don't worry about it," he said "We're just need the data to get a general idea of where we stand - the accuracy of the data doesn't matter." Oh yes it does, I come back. If the data isn't accurate, how will you know where you stand? "Doesn't matter - just get us the info..."

And that old feeling came back. We claim to seek quality, but will settle for quantity. We claim to have vision, but we really wear blinders.

I try so hard not to grow callous and cynical.

I try to stand.

And one day someone with a fifty cent title and a sense of self-importance comes along and knocks me down again.

Damn.