Too little
The report is someone else’s problem
“I passed the message on.”
The handoff has no agreed recipient, next step or check on the affected use.
Diligence
Correct an overlooked problem even when the sale is already complete.
Readiness to sustain due care in worthwhile effort.
Diligence gives sustained care to work worth doing, including what happens after delivery. A useful product must survive ordinary use, not merely its first presentation. Following a defect through diagnosis, correction and use turns a disappointed customer’s experience into work the team can improve.
Diligence gives a service that reaches the point of use
After your company launches a lunch carrier, a customer reports that the inner tray comes out only when the box is turned upside down. You test one over a plate: lunch arrives as a small landslide. Your manager would prefer to wait for the next batch. You explain the affected orders, agree who will test a revised tray and check that the replacement lets the customer lift lunch out normally. The carrier had taken “ready to serve” rather literally.
An illustrative scene.
Diligence: finding the balance
An employee follows a reported product fault through a proportionate correction after launch.
A fitting response
Care through to use
“Who is testing the replacement, and how will we know it works?”
Responsibility passes clearly and the correction is checked where it matters.
Pursued too far
One fault takes every hour
“Nothing else can happen until I personally inspect every box.”
Unbounded attention ignores the severity, other work and the capabilities of colleagues.
A minor cosmetic mark and an unusable tray call for different responses. Diligence matches care to the actual problem and can include a clear handoff to someone better placed to act.
What Diligence makes possible
Following through gives customers a functioning offering and gives colleagues knowledge they can use in the next batch. It joins separate jobs—support, design, packing and delivery—around the result they share. The employee need not do every job to make the connection dependable.
Diligence in ordinary life
A shared document
After correcting an instruction, check that the person using it can complete the task.
A service handoff
Agree who owns the next step and when the affected person will hear back.
Nearby virtues, different work
Perseverance
Perseverance sustains a purpose through setbacks. Diligence gives the current task its due care, including a task completed without difficulty.
Exactitude
Exactitude preserves the particulars of the request. Diligence carries the work through.
Diligence and its counterfeits
Busyness without a destination
Repeated checking counterfeits Diligence when nobody resolves the customer’s difficulty. Identify the outcome and the next responsible action.
How to cultivate Diligence
Reproduce the reported problem where it is safe and appropriate.
Agree a responsible next step and a proportionate check.
Follow the result far enough to know whether the useful purpose is met.
Try it today
Choose a small shared task already within your responsibilities. Check whether its recipient has what they need to use the result, and agree one next step if something is missing.
Questions worth returning to
- Where does this work meet its actual user?
- What check would tell us the correction has helped?
Keep the practice proportionate
These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.
About these practicesQuotations and further reading
Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.
What is done in business must be well done; for it is better to accomplish perfectly a small amount of work, than to half-do ten times as much.
Samuel Smiles · Self-Help
CHAPTER IX. Men of Business.; paragraph beginning “The examples we have already given of great workers in various branches of industry, art,…”
Samuel Smiles · Popular Edition, John Murray, London, 1897; Project Gutenberg #935.Smiles connects care with the amount of work actually completed. The employee’s correction should reach ordinary use rather than multiply unfinished responses. “Perfectly” belongs to his historical wording; the page retains a proportionate stopping point.
He who holds to his appointment and does not keep you waiting for him, shows that he has regard for your time as well as for his own.
Samuel Smiles · Self-Help
CHAPTER IX. Men of Business.; paragraph beginning “A proper consideration of the value of time, will also inspire habits of punctuality. “Pun…”
Samuel Smiles · Popular Edition, John Murray, London, 1897; Project Gutenberg #935.Care in carrying out an agreed follow-up recognizes the recipient’s time. The lunch-carrier employee should make the next contact dependable, not just promise vague attention.
Easy to every man the speech that shows the way; Hard thing to shape one's life by words they say!
Tiruvalluvar · Tirukkural
Couplet 664, Power in Action, printed p. 93
Tiruvalluvar · G. U. Pope, The Sacred Kurral of Tiruvalluva-Nayanar, W. H. Allen & Co., London, 1886.
Translated by G. U. Pope (verse translation; prose commentary excluded)The couplet distinguishes describing the work from carrying it out. Diligence means following the tray correction through to its tested use, beyond explaining what a fix should do.
Therefore measure not dispatch, by the times of sitting, but by the advancement of the business.
Francis Bacon · Essays
THE ESSAYS OR COUNSELS, CIVIL AND MORAL, / Of Dispatch; paragraph beginning “AFFECTED dispatch is one of the most dangerous things to business that can be. It is like…”
Francis Bacon · Project Gutenberg #575 transcription; underlying print edition not specified in the preserved capture.Bacon measures progress by advancement rather than apparent speed. The employee’s next step matters because it brings a working tray closer to the customer, not because a meeting ended quickly.
The most accurately nugatory labour is, perhaps, that of which not enough is given to answer a purpose effectually, and which, therefore, has all to be done over again.
John Ruskin · Unto This Last and Other Essays on Political Economy
UNTO THIS LAST: / ESSAY IV. / FOOTNOTES:; paragraph beginning “[55] The most accurately nugatory labour is, perhaps, that of which not enough is given to…”
John Ruskin · Ward, Lock & Co., London, Melbourne and Toronto, 1912; Project Gutenberg #36541.Ruskin’s footnote names the waste of work that falls short of its useful purpose. Checking the revised tray in use prevents an apparent correction from creating another round of work.
Men are much more likely to discover easier and readier methods of attaining any object, when the whole attention of their minds is directed towards that single object, than when it is dissipated among a great variety of things.
Adam Smith · The Wealth of Nations
Book I; CHAPTER I. OF THE DIVISION OF LABOUR.; paragraph beginning “Thirdly, and lastly, everybody must be sensible how much labour is facilitated and abridge…”
Adam Smith · Project Gutenberg #3300 transcription; underlying print edition not specified in preserved capture.Smith’s account of practical invention gives focused attention a productive role. Following the sticking tray closely enough to reproduce the fault creates the possibility of a useful correction.
It is not a knowledge of his specialty which makes an expert of service to society, but his insight into the relation of his specialty to the whole.
Mary Parker Follett · The New State
THE NEW STATE / Part I THE GROUP PRINCIPLE / VII THE INDIVIDUAL; paragraph beginning “Another illustration is that of the specialist. It is not a knowledge of his specialty whi…”
Mary Parker Follett · Longmans, Green & Co., 1918; Project Gutenberg #73755.Follett places specialist work in relation to its purpose and other participants. The product employee’s task reaches beyond reproducing the stuck tray to an agreed handoff and a replacement that works for the customer.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.