My last ISO9000 audit is underway. It sits right near the very top of the work list of things I will not miss.

We all understand why it exists on paper: to establish a baseline bar every company must meet to provide a service. But the actual bar used to measure performance doesn’t accomplish what it pretends to do. Instead, it generates an endless mountain of documents and an infinite loop of sign-offs on work. A high majority of staff, and I am saying north of 90 percent, have never actually read the ISO process documents.

ISO9000 has created a bloated quality department whose sole reason for breathing is to manage binders to make sure we pass a yearly audit. A mandated part of the ISO standard is a yearly management review of the quality system. We get walked through whatever metrics the departments collect to pretend they manage the business, pretending these metrics are how decisions are actually made.

It’s not real.

Half of my working career I have sat through these management meetings. Half of my career I have been audited. The majority, if not all, of it is a waste.

The rubber-stamped approvals, the pretend theater that a binder on a shelf dictates how a multi-million-dollar operation actually runs is a soul-crushing tax on employee talent. I have spent decades playing the game well enough to build complex products, but trading common sense, business acumen, and actual teamwork for a “tick in the box” to get and keep ISO is exhausting.

A company is run by people. A company is run through a good design of functions. A company excels through business sense, pragmatism, and having teams working together. I have seen fantastic companies with zero ISO9000 and terrible companies with the most pristine ISO9000 systems you can imagine. There is no correlation.

Everybody in the trenches knows the game: it is an expensive, self-licking ice cream cone designed to comfort risk-averse management and keep auditing firms flush with cash, while real common sense and actual leadership happen entirely in spite of it.

I have been responsible for the whole quality system of a company before. I took that company through the entire certification process myself, at a startup that grew large enough to work with Fortune 500 companies. I wrote the entire quality manual for every department in my spare time. I produced all the evidence pointing to our compliance. We got certified with one or two minor points.

No one in the company used it. Once we were certified and had the tick in the box, we went on with our normal business. It made zero difference.

Each year after that, we got audited. Our only job was to pass. In one audit, the reviewer went into the system and randomly picked a few products with unique serial numbers showing in stock, demanding we show the physical parts.

Now, we were a startup. Inventory control and perfect tracking was well beneath the line of what mattered to get products built. Sweat started to bead on my team lead’s forehead. He knew we wouldn’t find the product.

So, while we looked through a separate lab at installed products and shelves for twenty minutes to buy time, the team lead printed off new labels with the exact serial numbers, ran back, and labeled new products on the fly. When we got to the area, lo and behold, there was all the product.

Is this an extreme example? In the grand scheme of things, it’s no different than writing documents no one reads. Same thing. Because there is zero value in either.

Each year the auditor would find the mandatory one or two minor things we could improve on so they could get paid and hand us another check in the box. Worthless.

The Vader Principle of Quality Assurance

Do you think the Death Star had certification or inspections during its build process?

We see Darth Vader reviewing progress of the build of the Death Star in one scene. It had nothing to do with documentation. He cared about one thing: results. He cared about schedules. Schedule behind? Who’s in charge? Dead to me. Ok, really dead. Only results mattered. Not process, not make-work jobs, not binders.

The Empire’s quality assurance operated entirely on the Vader Principle: Performance is mandatory; failure is terminal.

If a thermal exhaust port wasn’t routed correctly, you didn’t file an Engineering Change Notice and wait for a change control board. Someone got Force-choked, a middle manager was immediately vaporized, and a fresh contractor was brought in under penalty of death to weld the panel by Tuesday.

It is the ultimate extreme of the results-only paradigm. It’s profoundly brutal, but nobody could ever accuse them of maintaining a shadow bureaucracy just to fake compliance for a certificate.

Maybe the Darth Vader world is old school. The one in charge fires and does what he wants. But they answered for the whole performance of the enterprise. Sometimes the old ways might be best.

I will not miss ISO9000 and audits.

When that auditor finally packs up their laptop for the last time and leaves my office, I will take a moment to look at that paperwork pile, pour a cup of strong coffee, and channel my inner Sith Lord.

Let them have their final minor non-conformance.

They’re dead to me anyway.

Another great reason to retire.

Meet and Greet with ISO auditors