Standards

Grant Leboff: Brian, in the book, you talk about the importance of standards. I think one of the examples you cite is the U.S Marines. I love this phrase that they use, it's, "high standards isn't what they do, it's who they are." Brian MacNeice: Yeah. Grant Leboff: Did you find that kind of, ethos let's say, amongst all the high-performance organizations? Brian MacNeice: Yeah. Yeah, so that phrase is a phrase that is common language within the U.S Marines. We found it repeated in lots of different examples. If I take the New Zealand all black rugby team, for example, they have a phrase that they talk about where, "The standard of okay is not okay. If all we are aspiring to be is okay, then that's not going to cut it." Again, I love that phrase. When I was with the St. Louis Cardinals, the baseball organization, by the way we were looking at both the baseball operation but also how the business itself was run, because the St. Louis Cardinals is as well run a business as I found anywhere in the world. When you talk to some of the front office people that are responsible for managing the business, they have a phrase that they use. Where they say, "Success is leased, and the rent is due everyday." In other words, we've got a commit to a standard every single day of doing the best work we can do on that given day. As long as we have that as a cultural norm across the organization, then we know that we're going to be on the right path. What was striking for us across the 12 case studies, was that principle just repeated itself time and time again. Articulated in slightly different ways, as you can see from those three examples, but nonetheless, the principle is exactly the same. Grant Leboff: You know, "Okay is not okay," and those kind of things. I suppose it is a nice phrase, but what really is amazing about these organizations when you read the book, it isn't just a phrase that they use. They live it. They mean it. Brian MacNeice: Yeah. Grant Leboff: How do you get that level of commitment? How do you get a phrase, because a phrase like that could easily be a platitude couldn't it? I know it isn't, but it could be. Brian MacNeice: Yeah. Grant Leboff: How do you get an organization where everybody's really living that kind of belief, it's not just something they say? Brian MacNeice: I think there's a few different things that feed into that. One, they performance manage against it. They challenge every time they see something that doesn't live up to that standard, they challenge that. It's not just a hierarchical challenge, it's a peer to peer challenge as well. For example in the New Zealand all black environment, players are as likely to call each other out where they don't live up to that standard of, "okay is not okay," as much as the coaches are. They don't wait for the leadership group in terms of the coaches to deal with that. It's a responsibility that's collectively managed across the entire player group. They also recruit against it. They recruit people who buy into that philosophy from the outset. Once you have that as a cultural norm within the organization, it's very, very difficult to go against that. When you have established that as a strong principle for how we operate day in, day out, reinforced by everything that we do, when new people come into the environment, they get it by osmosis. This is how we do stuff around here, you know? Kind of doing things to a standard that isn't up to the best it possibly could be just isn't acceptable here. Very quickly, people get conditioned to behave in that way. That's how it translates from something that looks great on a page, or on a wall, to something that actually may not even be written down but actually is part of how we just go about doing things every single day in this place. There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.