Steve Jobs once sent back a shipment of screws because they weren’t beautiful enough. Not functional enough. Beautiful.
Most people thought he was nuts.
What they missed was the standard you walk past becomes the standard you accept.
Think about the last time you saw something subpar in your organization. A sloppy email. A rushed presentation. A half-hearted customer interaction. Did you say something? Or did you walk past it?
The difference between good and bad standards is simple: good standards elevate everyone who encounters them. Bad standards erode everything they touch.
A good standard is clear. It’s measurable. Most importantly, it’s meaningful. It answers the question: What do we stand for when no one is watching?
A bad standard is vague, unenforceable, or purely cosmetic. It’s the mission statement on the wall that nobody reads. It’s the value everyone nods at but nobody lives.
Standards matter more than strategy: strategy changes with markets. Standards define who you are, regardless of what you sell.
So how do you develop them?
Start with what you won’t tolerate. Not what you aspire to, but what you refuse to accept. Jobs didn’t tolerate ugly screws. What won’t you tolerate?
Then make it visible. Standards hidden in handbooks don’t exist. They must be lived, spoken, and reinforced every single day.
Finally, measure what matters. If you say quality matters but only measure speed, you don’t actually have a standard. You have a slogan.
The organizations I work with that scale fastest aren’t the ones with the best strategies. They’re the ones with the clearest standards that everyone protects. That is hard.
Your standard isn’t what you write in your values document. It’s what you walk past without saying a word.
What are you walking past today?
