“Better,” said Voltaire, “is the enemy of good.”

I used this quote last year, describing it as a healthy attitude, to finish a column proposing seven warning signs of a culture of complacency. In response, the estimable Frank Hayes, who writes “Frankly Speaking” for Computerworld and is one of the best commentators in the industry, was kind enough to respond:

“It’s an incorrect translation. What Voltaire wrote, possibly quoting an existing French proverb, was: Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. “Mieux” does translate as “better.” But “le mieux” is always translated as “the best.” (No, I don’t know how they say “the better” in French.)

“So the translation should be: “The best is the enemy of good” — (unattainable) perfection is the enemy of (attainable) quality. Which is a worthwhile thing for us to remember, but it’s the flip side to the point you were making: better is (and should be) the enemy of good enough.

“Which doesn’t need to be translated from French — just translated into a lot of people’s brains.”

It’s an outstanding point (as you’d expect from both Voltaire and Frank Hayes): While satisfaction with mediocrity defines complacency, insistence on perfection is paralyzing. It’s pointless anyway, because the universe is a stochastic place where just about anything can happen. All the molecules of air in your bedroom could congregate in one corner while you’re sleeping, leaving you in a vacuum to asphyxiate. All of the uranium atoms in the nuclear reactor closest to you could decay at the same moment, causing a colossal explosion. Microsoft could release a version of Internet Explorer without security holes.

Hey, I didn’t say these events were likely. But they’re possible given the laws of physics as we know them. All that’s kept them from happening to you are the mathematical laws of probability.

In IT, competent project managers, system administrators and application developers all recognize the stochastic nature of their domains. Project team members get sick, hired away, or reassigned. Servers fail for indeterminable reasons and won’t come back up. The state-of-the-art development tool being used for a bunch of mission-critical code turns out to multiply wrong under certain unlikely circumstances.

Based on much of the correspondence responding to last year’s columns on complacent IT organizations, it appears some readers don’t live in a stochastic universe at all: In a truly well-run IT organization, they assert, everyone can leave promptly at 5pm every day because everything is always under control.

I don’t think so. Yes, in a well-run IT organization there will be days where nothing untoward interrupts the plan. In large, well-run IT organizations, though, the laws of large numbers take over and the odds that something goes awry increase to the point of inevitability. If a culture of complacency permeates, that won’t matter — everyone will leave at quitting time. In a healthier culture, professionals will work late to get the job done.

Quite a few readers agreed with my point — that if IT is a ghost town at 5pm it’s a symptom of complacency — but argued I shouldn’t have said so, because many executives would read it to mean that if anyone leaves at 5pm there’s a problem. That’s in spite of my also saying, in the same paragraph, “If everyone works late hours and six or seven day weeks all the time, it suggests a very different problem: Desperation. It comes from strong motivation — usually fear — coupled with severe ineffectiveness.” Their argument, while correct, is dangerous advice.

Writers are responsible for clarity. We’re responsible for avoiding ambiguity to the extent possible given constraints of space, limitations of language, and last-minute changes imposed by the copy desk. We’re responsible for marshaling persuasive facts and logic into a narrative framework that guides readers through the complexity of the subject matter.

We aren’t, however, responsible for every reader’s ability to comprehend. Some can’t. Others choose to mischaracterize because they read to gather ammunition, not new ideas.

This matters to you. As an IT leader, communication — listening, informing, and persuading — is a critical skill. Often, you’re informing and persuading non-technical executives of the need for hard-to-explain yet vital investments, such as those required to maintain a healthy IT architecture.

Communicators who spend their time and energy worrying about the ability of others to misunderstand them avoid controversial topics altogether, concerned that the consequences of someone misunderstanding their message are too large to risk. Business being a political environment, it’s a valid concern.

If you allow this concern to outweigh all others, though, you’ll have earned two labels: “craven,” and “politician.”

If you’ll forgive the redundancy.

Spiderman’s uncle, Ben Parker, expressed it well, if too often: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Hold that thought.

KJR Club member Roland Cole, responding to last week’s column about privilege, bureaucracy, and business governance made a good point — that nothing in my column distinguished privilege from the simple exercise of authority.

Let’s do that, starting with a few random threads:

• Privilege, you’ll recall, means “private law.” Bureaucracy is what you get when form triumphs over substance — when following the process is more important than achieving the desired result.

• The ancient Greeks differentiated dictators from tyrants. The former established the law through the raw exercise of authority; the latter simply exercised raw authority.Which, I suppose, means that a business leader who makes ad hoc decisions without respecting the need for consistency or policy is, in a sense, a tyrant. One who establishes the policy manual through the exercise of personal authority is a dictator. Oh, well, nobody ever said a business should be run as a democracy anyway. As last week’s column pointed out, the first requirement of a business is to be competitive — it’s in government that the first order of business is fairness.

• In addition to tyranny and dictatorship, the ancient Greeks defined, and tried out all of the “x-cracies.” There’s plutocracy (rule by the wealthy); aristocracy (rule by a hereditary nobility); democracy (rule by the majority); and meritocracy (rule by the best-qualified). Of course, the ancient Greeks got to everything first, including public sanitation systems, so don’t feel bad about it.

• In the absence of monopoly or collusion, business ends up being fair whether or not a particular business is fair, in that both customers and employees get to vote with their feet. The absence of competition is why government must regulate monopolies, and assuring competition is why government must prevent collusion. A business needn’t be fair, but the business community, as part of our society, must be. We aren’t supposed to be a society of privilege.

Which gets us to the clarification suggested by Mr. Cole: The exercise of authority doesn’t automatically constitute the establishment of privilege. That’s determined by how you exercise authority, and in favor of whom. It’s privilege when someone get their way because of who they are rather than because of the merits of their case. As Americans we rebel against this kind of thing: It means something a lot like an aristocracy is in charge.

A lot has to do with how you choose your inner circle. If it’s a bunch of like-minded souls, shame on you. To quote the un-Ben-Parker-like Lyndon Johnson, “If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.”

Public governance, emphasizing fairness, should be democratic. Business governance, emphasizing effectiveness, should be meritocratic. Which points to how you should create your inner circle: Choose highly capable people who frequently disagree with you.

Quite a few readers discussed the ethics of the matter. That wasn’t part of the column, and for a good (to me) reason.

While ethical behavior is a frequent topic in this column, I rarely appeal to ethics as a reason for either choosing or avoiding a particular course of action. That’s because your ethical code, like your religious choice, is a private matter. It’s likely different from mine, but no less valid for being so. Whenever someone appeals to your ethical code (or, even worse, your religious beliefs) when trying to persuade you, they’re making assumptions, many of which are likely to be false. Chances are good they’re also trying to persuade you to act in their best interests rather than your own: “Do the right thing,” is ManagementSpeak for “Do what’s best for me.”

I’m certainly not against ethics. Ethics are a good thing. By definition. In the absence of a professional code of ethics coupled with revocable credentials, though, an appeal to ethics is an exercise in futility. We’re all good people in our own eyes. Extraordinarily few people consider themselves to be evil or their behavior unconscionable — even serial killers manage to rationalize their behavior to themselves. The notion that Satan causes the evil that happens on this earth is quaint, but fails the test of Occam’s Razor. We humans do a fine job of it on our own.

If you do want to think of this as an ethical matter, Ben Parker points you in the right direction: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

It’s eloquent, even if it does plagiarize Winston Churchill’s, “The price of greatness is responsibility.” But then, if you plagiarize Winston Churchill, whatever you say will be eloquent.

And worth hearing.