By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker

I’ve mentioned the lightning-strike narrative in entrepreneurship and how I wish it came up less frequently. (See: 4 Questions Successful Entrepreneurs Must Answer and The New Face of Business.)  When people think they all have to be the next Mark Zuckerberg to be successful, they may never get started on what could be a great enterprise. I feel the same way about keeping the entrepreneurial spirit alive in an established business: insisting on world-changing new ideas costs us meaningful, incremental improvement.

Eugene Ivanov talks about the distinction between these schools of thought over at Innovation Excellence, in his article “Can Money Buy Innovation?”  He reports studies on workplace innovation where the return on financial rewards hits a wall. After a certain amount, monetary rewards don’t buy any more ideas. More importantly, no increase in money improves the quality of the ideas. You can buy a steady stream of good ideas, but like happiness, money can’t buy exceptional brainwaves. Ivanov’s point, and mine too, is that that’s okay. In fact, that’s great!

My own experience in business is that incremental innovation yields wonderful results. My own business was an incremental improvement on what the real estate industry already did. I didn’t invent the wheel, I just made it turn a little faster. If I had bought into the idea that only a paradigm-shifting business had a chance, I would never have started my own business. Furthermore, once I started, if I’d thought that only exceptional changes were worth making, I wouldn’t have improved my business.

There is a saying: perfection is the enemy of the good. If we insist on only chasing perfection, we don’t improve. Improving is hard work. It often involves small steps forward that don’t feel as rewarding in the short term as that light-bulb moment we want. In the long run, though, improvements – even small ones – to our services and products often mean the world to our customers. A happy customer can be the difference between success and failure for a company. Failing to improve while we wait for genius to strike can cause a long, slow bleed of business.

The New York Times recently ran an Opinion piece, “Why You Hate Work,” which contains a lot of hard data about satisfaction among workers. Time and support for workers to think about how to improve and move forward is the rarest of 14 qualities used to measure workplace satisfaction. 70% of the workers surveyed are not encouraged to think about improving the business. No matter what size improvement you’re looking for, that’s no good.

The “Great Man” theory of history, made popular in the 19th century, said that historic advances were all due to Heroes, or Great Men (sorry ladies, I didn’t name it), rather than the broader, more societal forces. A lot of startup and intrapreneurship stories seem to subscribe to the Great Man Theory – this is the era of the disruptive individual with an idea that will change the world.

I think, as it did for the historians, the time has come to embrace a new theory that better reflects the world. It’s time to honor the power of incremental innovation, in starting and continuing businesses.

Ed McLaughlin is currently co-writing the book “The Purpose Is Profit: Secrets of a Successful Entrepreneur from Startup to Exit” with Wyn Lydecker and Paul McLaughlin.

Copyright © 2014 by Ed McLaughlin All rights reserved.