You can’t pursue excellence and stay the same — growth demands reinvention.
Over time, even the best jobs can become routine. Familiarity dulls curiosity, and motivation starts to slip. My boss used to talk about the importance of “repotting” yourself — a metaphor we loved because it captured the truth: sometimes you need new soil, new challenges, and new ways to grow.
Repotting didn’t always mean changing roles. More often, it meant reinventing the work itself — finding ways to elevate the job, improve the process, or create new opportunities.
After The Mirage opened, that’s exactly what we did. We looked back at our practices and asked a simple question: What should we improve? That led us to explore technology to increase efficiency and eliminate low‑value work.
· We were manually entering candidate information from paper applications, filing, and refiling them throughout the recruitment process, and tracking every form by hand.
· We were managing job offers, onboarding, training, and performance documentation with the same paper‑heavy system.
Fixing these things did more than streamline the work.
It freed employees from repetitive tasks, gave them room to take on higher‑value responsibilities, and created a sense of pride in building a more progressive workplace. It also sparked something bigger: people began looking for ways to improve their own processes.
Reinvention became contagious.
And because these changes came from within — not from a forced “rah‑rah” speech about limitless potential — people embraced them. They could see the growth. They could feel the impact. They were part of the evolution.
Excellence isn’t a slogan or a program.
It’s the act of letting people help build the systems, tools, and ideas that shape something great — something they’ll talk about with their children and grandchildren. Cutting‑edge work builds morale, ownership, and pride. That’s the foundation of a culture of excellence.
Excellence accelerates the moment people are empowered to reinvent the work, not just perform it. Look for ways to make that happen today.
Max De Pree (1924 – 2017): American businessman (CEO and Board member of Herman Miller office furniture company) and writer (Leadership is an Art).[1]
[1] In 1992, De Pree was inducted into the Junior Achievement's U.S. Business Hall of Fame. He was involved with the Max De Pree Center for Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary (established in 1996 as the De Pree Center) since its establishment.
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