Introduction
As one analyzes the root causes underlying critical issues that people have faced throughout history a definitive trend becomes clear.
The standards that you set determine the outcomes that are achieved.
Standards matter because they define what First Principle Group calls an Acceptable Standard of Operations (ASO). The ASO has 2 key pillars, the “Floor”, which is the minimum acceptable standard, and the “Ceiling”, which is the targeted objective.
This is critically important because the Floor and Ceiling frame and dictate all subsequent analyses, decision-making, and actions.
Here’s an example that illustrates how and why standards are so important to decision-making.
Bar Raisers
At Amazon, they have a unique program as part of their hiring system. The program is called Bar Raiser and it selects current Amazon employees to undergo months or even years of training and shadowing to ultimately become a Bar Raiser. Their role is to join the hiring process and provide specific input and expertise to Amazon’s interviewers on how to hire the absolute best people. Amazon describes a Bar Raiser as,
A Bar Raiser is an interviewer at Amazon who is brought into hiring loops to be an objective third party. By bringing in somebody who’s not associated with the team, the best long-term hiring decisions are made to ensure the company is always serving, surprising, and innovating for customers. The role of the Bar Raiser is to be a steward of Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles.
When Amazon launched the hiring plan for tech job candidates in 1999, it was called the barkeeper program. But that name implied maintaining a hiring standard, when actually the program is about raising the standard with each hire. Every person hired should be better than 50 percent of those currently in similar roles – that’s raising the bar.
3 of the key questions that Bar Raisers will ask Amazon’s interviewers are:
- Will you admire this person?
- Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering?
- Along what dimension will this person be a superstar?
This Bar Raiser program demonstrates the importance of the Standards Determine Success principle in the following ways.
First, Amazon is proactively working to redefine and continually raise hiring standards, as demonstrated by targeting that new hires should be better than 50 percent of current employees in similar roles.
Instead of hiring people that can capably perform like their current employees, which is what the vast majority of organizations do, Amazon is looking to hire people that are definitively better than the majority of their current employees.
Second, the questions that Bar Raisers drive interviewers to think about are important because they vary significantly from those of a typical interviewer. For example, when hiring a subordinate many people automatically look for someone who’s capable but frankly somewhat “beneath them” since they know that person will be in a lower position. On the other hand, the Bar Raisers want Amazon’s interviewers to only hire people that they would actively admire, even if the new hire may be in a considerably lower position.
Third, they aren’t looking for a new hire that will just do the job capably even though that may already even be a challenge. Instead, they only want to hire people that would actually raise the overall effectiveness of the group. Essentially being good is not good enough, you’re expected to advance the entire team’s effectiveness beyond what it was.
Lastly and most importantly, they set the standard as high as possible by asking how the candidate will be a superstar; not good, not capable, not great, but a superstar. This is further driven home by Jeff Bezos’ famous line from the original 1997 Amazon Letter to Shareholders,
You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.
These standards frame and affect all analyses, decision-making, and hiring actions for Amazon and illustrate why standards are so impactful. If an organization simply sets its standards differently, for example seeking capable hires instead of true superstars, the results will inevitably be different.
One additional note from Bezos is important. In the 2018 Letter to Shareholders he writes,
I believe high standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread.
This critically clarifies that high standards can be taught/developed as opposed to being intrinsic and needing to be “found” and that they are contagious, which further increases their impact and value.
The importance of the Standards Determine Success principle lies in the fact that it fundamentally transforms your perspective on 2 things: what is acceptable, and what is possible. This then impacts every single decision that you make and the outcomes that are achieved.
The foundational decision-making principle Standards Determine Success – Be a Professional means that across all personal, business, and societal situations you should refer to and hold the absolute highest standards possible. Holding the standards of a top professional regardless of your current capacity provides the most effective framing in order to make daily decisions on minimum acceptable practices and targeted objectives.
To further demonstrate, let’s discuss the latter part of the principle: Be a Professional.
The vast majority of people don’t apply the same standards and requirements of professionalism that they would in their work to the rest of their life, with unsurprising results.
For example, pick several areas of your life, let’s say:
- Health
- Relationships
- Parenting
- Personal finance
Now define how you act in each of these areas of your life, for example:
- Do you research, study, and gain new technical knowledge?
- What metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) do you measure?
- How do you evaluate performance?
- How do you structure communication and hold meetings?
- How do you seek feedback from your customer?
- How do you collect and analyze relevant data?
- Do you engage in structured, planned, continuous improvement?
- Do you and how do you plan?
- How consistent are you in executing any of your plans?
Now take your own answers and ask yourself,
“If someone worked for me and acted in exactly the same way, would I accept that?”
“Would I expect them to be successful and perform well?”
Likely the answer will be a resounding no to both questions.
In our non-working life we break just about every single standard and best-practice from the business world yet somehow still expect positive results.
For example we don’t:
- Understand our customer
- Clearly define success
- Plan, budget, and prepare
- Consistently execute the plan
- Study/research/gain technical knowledge
- Establish clear roles and responsibilities
- Quantitatively measure progress
- Communicate and align
- Regularly evaluate performance
- Pursue structured and incremental continuous improvement
It is especially important that we understand the ramifications of not applying the Standards Determine Success principle. When you analyze some of the most pressing concerns throughout society and around the world, you can trace their roots back to low standards and a lack of professionalism. Below are a few significant examples.
Government
Critical issues primarily result from a lack of professionalism in the selection and training of government executives and lawmakers.
For example, in the US every single other critical occupation demands rigorous education, training, assessment, selection, performance evaluation, and continued education/training. Think about physicians, pilots, pharmacists, engineers, scientists, architects, attorneys, actuaries, software engineers, and accountants.
Yet government officials are elected purely via a popularity contest and undergo zero training, assessment, performance evaluation, etc.
Education
Critical issues primarily result from a lack of professionalism in the selection and training of teachers and administrators.
As an example, in Finland, where the education system consistently ranks as one of the best in the world, it is mandatory for all teachers to earn a Master’s Degree in education, and specifically from 1 of 8 universities with specialized education research programs. Furthermore, these Master’s programs are extremely selective and include significant research work as well as hands-on practice in a teacher training school with real students (similar to a teaching hospital for medical students).
In Finland, it is easier to get accepted to medical school or law school than the Master’s of Education program.
For example at Finland’s largest university, Helsinki University, the education program had a 6.8% acceptance rate in 2016 (which is equivalent to MIT’s acceptance rate in the US). Meanwhile, the medical school had a 7.3% acceptance rate and the law school had an 8.3% acceptance rate.
As a result, the teachers that do make it out of Finland’s rigorous assessment, selection, and training process are given significant autonomy and trust in their classrooms and face minimal standardized testing pressures.
Contrast this to the US where only a Bachelor’s degree is required, acceptance rates are wildly less selective, all accredited universities are accepted, research work is not required, teacher autonomy is restricted, and standardized testing pressures are significant and continually increasing.
Interestingly teacher pay is not a key differentiating factor, as teachers in Finland have similar and actually slightly lower actual salaries compared to the US, as you can see below from OECD’s Education at a Glance 2019.
This further emphasizes the impact of holding higher standards for teacher selection and training, as Finnish people continue to pursue a challenging teaching career because of prestige, respect, and autonomy, not because of financial reasons.
Environment
Environmental destruction primarily results from a lack of professionalism in consumer buying decisions and management of population growth.
Consumers buy quite emotionally as opposed to how a professional Sourcing or Procurement manager would purchase in a structured and analytical way. This means consumers rarely fully consider or factor in product quality and longevity, packaging, transportation, pollution, deforestation, and other environmental effects. People on average just buy what they happen to want when they want it. This means that companies typically have little to no incentive to change their sourcing and manufacturing practices.
Additionally, we place zero policies, mandates, protocols, etc. around the management of population growth, yet somehow expect that the environment will magically sustain an unlimited human population.
Health
Obesity crises result from a lack of professionalism in diet, exercise, lifestyle, and mental regulation.
Consider how an athlete would track and analyze their diet, exercise, mobility, sleep, stress levels, water intake, nutrient and hormone levels, etc. Meanwhile, average people hold few to none of those standards yet still somehow hope to look like athletes, bodybuilders, and fitness models.
A few examples of applying the Standards Determine Success principle vs. typical current approaches:
Imagine if you had someone who worked for you who had zero technical knowledge, didn’t study or research for their job, had zero training or education, performed no planning and preparation, didn’t know how to communicate effectively with others, didn’t want to measure performance or have any standard metrics, and had no plans to improve their skills or capabilities in the future.
Instead, they decided they would just “figure it out”. How do you think that would go?
1Parenting: Unfortunately that’s exactly what the vast majority of people do when they become parents. They take on one of the most difficult jobs possible in raising a child, but:
- Do essentially zero training, study, or practice
- Don’t know what metrics they should measure as parents
- Already typically have poor communication with their spouse/significant other and don’t set future communication routines/meetings
- Don’t treat each other professionally as they would in a workplace
- Haven’t put together a detailed plan or strong budget
- Haven’t saved enough money to deal with unexpected circumstances
- Have no clear plan to improve in these areas in the future
Instead, hold yourself to professional standards and approach being a parent as if it’s your job (because essentially it is):
- Gain technical knowledge and training (e.g. about psychology, personality types and traits, habits, education, communication, emotional regulation, diet and health, personal finance, etc.)
- Hold structured meetings with your partner to communicate and align
- Practice/simulate handling different future scenarios
- Perform structured problem solving
- Plan and budget (for 18+ years by using sets of assumptions, not just for a year or two)
- Quantitatively measure progress
- Pursue continuous improvement
2Business: Ironically, even though we talk about these best practices coming from the business world, in reality, the majority of people aren’t actually applying them to their work/teams/business on a daily basis.
For example question whether or not you:
- Have clarity and alignment on the vision, mission, and strategic objectives of your organization and specific team
- Have clear roles and responsibilities
- Have assigned cascading key performance indicators and supporting metrics – e.g. balanced scorecard
- Utilize effective meeting/communication routines
- Clearly understand the voice of your customer
- Apply consistent process improvement principles
- Pursue structured continuous improvement
- Position your business in a blue ocean vs. red ocean
3Relationships and Marriages: This is another key example of an area in life that we don’t treat professionally. For example, in your own relationship or marriage do you:
- Do any study or training? Such as:
- How to understand your own thoughts and emotions, their root causes, and how they affect your relationships
- How to resolve conflict and negotiate consensus
- How to build accountability in a relationship
- How to define and align on vision and values
- How to listen and communicate effectively
- Hold meetings like you would hold team/steering/executive meetings at work to communicate and align?
- Establish any measurements/metrics of how your relationship is performing?
- Make performance improvement plans?
- Consistently show up to do the work?
Additional articles, case studies, maturity models, and tools coming soon.