Best candidate – the law of diminishing returns

Daniel Hamermesh makes an interesting point in his Freakonomics blogpost - Why Finding the Best Isn't Worth It.

"Despite that, rational marital search, job search, or search for a high quality/low price product should stop when the gains from additional searches begin to fall short of the cost of spending the time and money searching and of giving up the pleasure of what you can already get".

What we can learn from it is that grass on the other side may always look greener and we need to and can make the best with what we have. Don't stop looking for the best or striving to be the best, but don't let yourself and your organization get into analysis paralyses either. It's a fine line to walk, but intuitively you will know what the right answer is.