A word to a professional “lover of perfection” – this is how teacher John Bowers characterizes himself. He trains drivers for the American logistics company UPS. John assures: perfection can not only lead to super results, but also save lives.
Small negligence of workers who do their job 99.9%, and not 100%, leads to the fact that 250 thousand people die every year from medical errors in the United States alone.
In my work there is also a very high cost of error. If one of the drivers does his job 99%, this can lead to death. After all, every day 100 people die in car accidents.
That’s why I teach my drivers the values of excellence
- I demand that they remember our 131-word defensive driving program perfectly.
- I check the dress code daily.
- I demand punctuality from my drivers.
If you can’t do these small things right, then you will fail when you take on something bigger.
If US credit card manufacturers were only 99.9% efficient, there would be over a million cards in circulation today that have incorrect tape information.
If American doctors were only 99.9% correct, 4.4 million prescriptions would be incorrect every year, and 11 newborns would be given to the wrong parents every day.
Trying to be perfect is stressful. But saying that the quest for perfection is too stressful is like saying exercise is too grueling. In both cases, if you want results, you must endure the pain. So saying that striving for perfection is too stressful is just an excuse for laziness.
And finally, a few examples of work completed to 99.9%
- A programmer made a small mistake in Amazon’s supercode, which slowed down the company’s website for 4 hours. During this time, she lost $160 million.
- An employee of the pharmaceutical company New England Compound improperly cleaned the laboratory. As a result, 76 people died and more than 700 more became infected with meningitis.
- A $1.4 billion plane with hundreds of people on board crashed because someone forgot to check a sensor.