Excellence Supplies Critical!

That must be how Bear Stearns fell. It surely wasn't a lack of their pursuit of excellence! Maybe the excellence pumps suddenly ran dry or something.

Bear Stearns: One-on-One with President/co-COO Spector -- Incremental Excellence Bear Stearns remains the "steady Eddy" of the big U.S. brokers, pursuing a deliberate, incremental growth strategy buffeted by a strong risk culture and...

And so on. If there's an upside to the Great Recession, maybe it will be the death of some useless business buzzwords. "Excellence" isn't a physical object, and it's not a clearly defined state of affairs for a company. You will never know if you reach it.