Mankind has achieved so much in the past few centuries and the rate of

development continues to grow today. In the last century alone, through

innovations, heaps of imagination and hard work, some of the world’s most

important inventions were able to see the light of day. These inventions such as

the telephone, continue to be reshaped and presented to us in different ways.

The development we see today would not have been possible, without the people

involved, following a code or set of guidelines or principles to help them to

monitor their progress. These principles and guidelines are what we call

standards. Standards allow us to compare our work with that of another, judge

the impact of different events and someone’s actions and inventions, allow us to

be competitive in a world where uniqueness is a rarity and most importantly

standards breed efficiency by helping us attain better results and reducing the

wastage of our knowledge and abilities.

Standards allow people who are working towards the same goals to compare and

contrast their progress with each other and therefore allow them to produce

better results. When Apple Inc. unveiled the first iphone to the public in 2007,

the concept of a phone that could multitask, i.e. a smartphone, was largely just

that, a concept, for cellphone users and even mobile developers across the world.

The Iphone, although, was not the first smartphone, it was the first of its kind to

be made available across the globe. It wasn’t long before other companies, who

were essentially working on the same ideas and concepts, presented their own

versions of the Iphone. Nokia brought the Nokia 5800, Samsung the Galaxy S and

Sony Ericsson the Xperia X 2. Iphone became the standard for smartphone

developers who compared and contrasted their work with that of Apple Inc.’s

and strived to build a better smartphone both in terms of price and quality. Apple

Inc. itself has learned from its competitors in improving the design of the Iphone

e.g. HTC’s economical and innovative use of materials such as aluminum in the

construction of its smartphones has served as an inspiration for Apple to bring

down the manufacturing cost of the Iphone which, in its 5th generation, remains

the most expensive smartphone on the market.

Standards allow us to judge the impact of different events on the world around

us. The biggest natural disaster of its kind, the 2004 tsunami, led to the deaths of

230,000 people and destroyed whole communities in South East Asia. It has been

termed as one of the worst natural disasters in modern history and has become

the benchmark to which every other similar incident is compared e.g. the tsunami

off the coast of Japan in 2011 caused less deaths and destruction over a relatively

small area and therefore pales in terms of impact to the 2004 tsunami. The 2004

tsunami has been used as the yard stick for the development of safety measures

against tsunamis and has allowed countries to focus their efforts to provide better

and economical protection for their people against natural disasters.

In universities and schools today, every student strives to be outstanding in his or

her fields of study. The universities and schools compare the academic

capabilities of the students against standards that have been set up by them in

conjunction with other universities and schools and Education Ministries. If no

standards existed, the talent and abilities of the students would be wasted as the

students wouldn’t have any idea of how they are supposed to perform

academically and what is required of them. For instance, the Pakistan Engineering

Council requires a civil engineering undergraduate to complete 139 credit hours

worth of courses in order to be registered as a world class civil engineer. If a civil

engineering student A passed courses that amounted to more than the 139

required credit hours, A would have essentially wasted his or her time and energy

to be given the same status as another student B who completed his

Undergraduate studies with no less than 139 credit hours. Also it is more likely

that the quality of A’s work as an engineer would be lower than that of B’s, since

A divided his or her attention between more courses than B. The gist of this

example is that standards reduce wastage and can allow you to produce better

results with a greater focus on quality than quantity.

Standards provide efficiency to every type of system. It’s hard to imagine a world

without standards. A world without standards is one where people have nothing

to aim for, where people have no way of differentiating their work in a particular

field with that of the others in the same field and the spirit of competition is non-

existent. A world without standards is a world where there is no line between

extraordinary and ordinary and there is no way to determine the rate of

development, let alone a way of identifying development.