Why bad apples spoil your day
You’ve likely heard the adage “One bad apple spoils the bunch.” Have you ever asked why?
You’ve likely heard the adage “One bad apple spoils the bunch.” Have you ever asked why?
I did.
Imagine ranking a bushel of apples on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is rotten and 10 is perfection. After evaluating each apple on a bushel, you give all the apples a ranking between 8 and 10 and have an average ranking of 9.2. Adding anl apple that ranks 10 will increase your average, but the impact will be modest because it’s only slightly above your average. On the other hand, adding a bad apple with a 2 rank significantly impacts your average because the difference between your average and this bad apple is large.
I learned that a bad apple pulls down the rest because it’s typically further away from your current average. Moreover, that one bad apple often has a greater effect than a good apple because the good apple isn’t as far away from your average as the bad apple.
This principle applies to your business in three ways:
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1. People
Your bad apples have an outsized impact on your culture. In fact, the stronger and more cohesive your culture — or the worse the apple — the greater the drag. Make sure you strategically choose what behaviors you won’t tolerate as part of designing your business and be willing to remove people from your team if they continue to exhibit those behaviors.
Note that adding new people to your team won’t solve the issue any more than scoring 100% would. Moreover, they’re likely to adopt the behaviors in practice to fit in so if that bad apple is still there, you’re tainting every new team member.
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2. Data
When you’re reviewing data, one low number can skew the results. Pull out that number and try to understand what’s causing it in isolation. The goal is to determine if it is in fact an outlier or an early indication of a pattern. An outlier is just that and you shouldn’t allow it to distort your insights. A pattern however could be caught early and addressed before it becomes pervasive — something that’s especially important if the pattern tells you that you aren’t effectively delivering value.
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3. Regulations
Many laws, regulations, and other bureaucratic paperwork exist because of bad apples. You can start by not being the bad apple that makes life difficult for the other 97% of businesses. After that, keeping this reality in mind as you navigate different requirements can give you some perspective because you need to make strategic choices that account for the world as it is rather than the world as you think it should be.
You can also try to do something about them if they’re constraining your business whether that’s getting involved in the political process1 or choosing a different vendor whose requirements aren’t so laborious.
My Chamber of Commerce does a sound job of updating me on the laws and regulations under consideration as well as providing routes to respond to them.