College was a waste of time, not because they didn’t try to teach me anything, but because I was an idiot. Considering that I cum laude’d the darn thing, this may make for an interesting Braintropolis post someday. In the meantime, I revisit that period of my life simply to recall one of the few things useful I learned while there.

Well, not much of a recall, anyway, but close enough. Got it from a “Risk Management” class, the ramifications of a 99% success rate. I no longer have the actual examples and figures used, but it’s easy enough to recreate doing Google searches for appropriate data and futzing around with a calculator.

• There are about 87,000 flights in the US daily, or 31,755,000 a year. A 99% success rate means 317,550 plane crashes annually, and just in the US.

• More than 4 million babies are born in the US each year. If 99% of the mothers survive childbirth, that would mean about 40,000 mothers will die each year giving birth.

• About 16,065,000 children a year in the US between the ages of 0-5 go to some kind of daycare arrangement. A 99% survival rate would then mean 160,650 of those infants and toddlers will die as a direct result of that care each year.

Obviously the assumptions are faulty (although not the data; links to sources below) and the numbers are used for dramatic effect, but you get the picture and the point.

Here’s a more real world personal example that uses no alarming or dramatic numbers or data to show that if you’re a business worth your salt, perfect everything really is the only target to aim for.

Some of you know that my wife gave me twin daughters, Sarah and Alexa, over 7 months ago, and that we also have a son, Daniel, who just turned 3yo very recently. A few months ago, when my wife Fabienne returned to work, not only was she feeling guilty about leaving the girls for much of the day, she also felt terrible for not being able to give Daniel much attention even when she was home, what with her being quite busy with, well, let’s call them “infant twin maternal duties.”

Toddlers being toddlers, Daniel enjoys fast food over home-cooked meals. Particularly those with the accompanying “free gift” with the meal. He probably enjoys them more since he doesn’t get to indulge too often — we aren’t nuts, but neither are we San Francisco Big Brother Nazis, however, since last we checked, parents decide and control what food our kids get to eat, not McDonald’s… whatever. Anyway, point is, Daniel loves and enjoys the occasional fast food child’s meal. The healthiest out there I think is the Chick-fil-A Chick-n-Strips Kid’s Meal. Fortunately, it’s one of Daniel’s favorites (guess what his other fast food favorite is… don’t think too hard).

Well, one Friday night after rushing home somewhat late from work, Fabienne told Daniel she was driving (I don’t drive anymore) to the nearest Chick-fil-A to pick up a Chick-n-Strips Kid’s Meal for him and food for the rest of us as well. You should have seen Daniel’s face light up from the news.

The closest Chick-fil-A’s in the food court of a nearby shopping mall. So no drive-thru. My wife would need to find parking in the mall’s garage, walk to the food court, stand in line, order the food, then wait a tad for the Chick-fil-A team to put the order together — not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things, but with all things considered, assuming everything fell into place perfectly, she was still looking at a 30 minute job round trip. Reality: Probably more like 45 minutes on average.

After Fabienne got back with a few bags of fast food goodies and I started distributing the chow to eager, hungry faces seated around the dining table, I had some terrible news for Daniel: Chick-fil-A had everything in his Kid’s Meal bag except for the all important Chick-n-Strips. They forgot to put in the strips, the core element around which the “meal” is built upon. Trooper that he is, Daniel didn’t go off on a tantrum or start crying. He just sank a little bit in his seat and quietly said, “OK,” breaking his mother’s heart.

I scrambled off to the kitchen to nuke off a good handful of popcorn chicken for Daniel — if you’ve got kids and a microwave oven, you learn quickly to always have a bag of these handy in your freezer — while Fabienne got on the phone to Chick-fil-A to, well, vent. It’s not like she really expected anything else from it.

I really would have hated to be the Chick-fil-A manager fielding that call since, really, there was nothing he could say or do to make that right. Waste another 30-45 minutes to get a replacement meal? Yeah right. And a refund? What was the meal, 5 dollars? Yup, zooming off to the mall to get that even if my wife had nothing else to do at home was really happening (I’m not even counting what it costs to park in that mall’s parking garage). No, the manager just had to listen to a tired, broken-hearted mom complain about their failure.

Obviously, this could have been avoided if my wife had checked the bag before she left the counter — and believe me, I’m surprised my tongue didn’t gush rivers of blood as I bit down hard to keep from accidentally blurting that out against my better judgment. But really, now that I’m thinking about it, why should she have to? Why should any of us have to? We only do it because we’ve been trained, from experience no less, to expect such screw ups as normal, and really, my friends, that’s the saddest part of all. We hold up our end of the bargain — we give the money they ask for — so all we ask is they do their promised end, something they obviously fail at enough times that we adjust our behavior for it. Sad, just sad.

We haven’t revisited the incident, nor Chick-fil-A, since. But it’s only been a few months. I’m sure my wife will get over this eventually and we’ll no doubt be back as customers some day. And she hasn’t gone off on an unreasonable anti-Chick-fil-A crusade — again, we’re not San Francisco Big Brother Nazis. So, big picture, this has cost Chick-fil-A absolutely nothing practically speaking. But I remember Daniel’s face when I told him the bad news. And I remember his mother’s face when she saw his. It may not have been much and it may have been brief, but Chick-fil-A’s tiny little percentage of a failure cost us something.

So there, folks, is why perfect performance is really the only target to aim for. Every failure hurts somebody somewhere somehow. I don’t care if it’s only 1% of all incidents, or even if it’s only .01%, accepting more than a zero percent rate of hurting anyone in the course of normal business is clearly unacceptable. In my book anyway. Yes, we’ll never achieve that perfection, but experience has taught me the more we aim for it, the closer we get. Which, in this case, means the less people we end up hurting.

Yeah, I like to think we can be better than “normal.” And easily. And yet, I continue to buy bags of frozen popcorn chicken. Sad.

– EES

References:

• How many airline flights per day in U.S. average? [Yahoo! Answers]
• 22 surprising facts about birth in the United States [BabyCenter]
• Maternal mortality: how many women die in childbirth in your country? [guardian.co.uk]
• Number of Children in the U.S. by Age [ChildStats.gov]
• Daycare’s Shocking Statistics [Fox News]

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