Here is an excerpt from an article written by Bill Taylor for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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If there’s one message I have stressed more than any other over the last few years, it is that it is not good enough to be pretty good at everything. The most successful companies, products, and brands have figured out how to become the most of something — not just adequate, but downright amazing.

If there’s one pushback I’ve received more than any other over the last few years, it is that I am setting an unreasonably high bar. “We’re not cutting-edge like Google or Facebook, our company is old-fashioned,” some executives reply. “This is not a glamorous industry,” others protest, “don’t expect us to be like Apple or Nike.”

That’s a cop-out. I don’t care what field you’re in or what kind of company you work for. It is possible to transform anything you do from adequate to amazing, if you think hard enough about what amazing means in your field and creatively enough about how to stand out from the crowd.

A case in point: a truly stunning parking garage in Miami Beach, Florida. The seven-story structure, at 1111 Lincoln Road, serves about as prosaic a function as can be imagined: it’s a place to park cars. But when Robert Wennett bought the homely space back in 2005, he decided to turn something adequate into something amazing. As a New York Times report explained, “Parking garages, the grim afterthought of American design, call to mind many words. (Rats. Beer cans. Unidentifiable smells.) Breathtaking is not usually among them.”

But this parking garage truly is breathtaking, so much so that it has become an in-demand venue for charity events, wine tastings, even fancy weddings. The top two floors were designed to both hold cars and host events, and they rent for as much as $15,000 per night. “This is not a parking garage,” Robert Wennett told the Times. “It’s really a civic space.”

Talk about positive word of mouth. I first heard about 1111 Lincoln Road when I attended the American Express Luxury Summit in Park City, Utah. That’s right: Executives from some of the world’s most exclusive brands were discussing the beauty and originality of a parking garage thousands of miles away. If that’s not moving from adequate to amazing, I’m not sure what is.

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There’s no excuse to settle for “good enough” anymore. It’s time to transform products and services that are adequate into things that are amazing.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

William C. Taylor is cofounder of Fast Company magazine and author of Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself, published January 4, 2011. Follow him at twitter.com/practicallyrad.