Question the status quo and reinvent the wheel all the time!

Don’t be afraid to question the status quo. We should build things by ourselves, reinvent the wheel all the time. In short term it is a lousy strategy, but in the long run…
There has been a nice example from my (Alisher’s) personal experience.
PPDP stands for Personal & Professional Development Plan. And it is questionable - what is the difference between personal and professional? Normally it is hard to differentiate between the two as personal qualities are widely applied in professional fields and vice versa. Being confident - is it a personal or professional quality? Seems like both, right? Or what about being a flexible person? Same. So, how to build personal and/or professional development plans?
Here is the answer I got: Personal - is what you get for yourself, and Professional - is what you give to the organization. It is that simple.
Okay, now from the qualities perspective, everything will relate to personal side as it will never belong to the ecosystem in which you work. But equally the number of sales you make this week will never belong personally to you, that’s your professional achievement that you kinda give as a gift to your employer.
So, your personal path may look like:
I needed to describe this example just because there are big giants in the corporate world that have not defined the difference for themselves.
Another great example is mission definition. Amazon says that its mission is to “Be the world’s most customer obsessed company” but for all the practical purposes that statement is just invalid. First of all, it does not reflect the company’s essence, it just reflects the company’s ambitious. Because any successful company has to be the most obsessed over customer. By these means, Amazon simply says “We want to be the most successful company of all times“ which basically makes no sense as mission is not about scale of your aspirations, it is about essence of your culture and values.
But obviously it didn’t stop them from becoming Amazon.
We have a different lesson here - human beings do not care unlike robots whether something is right or wrong. Look at Trump’s led riots in Capitol. That is probably the most unprecedented act in the modern history yet he has not been punished for that (yet) and what is even worse - there are people who are willing to follow him til death! That is our human nature, in some circumstances we do not listen to our heads, just our hearts. And that might be dangerous.

Moreover, the approach that is being described here has always been widely applied at Google - to build everything from scratch and use own models. Every time someone approached Larry with a suggestion, the co-founder asked “Why are we going to do like that?”. And if the answer was “Well, that’s just the industry standard”, the odds are that it would not be the way they would go simply because it is never good to follow the industry’s standards. We have to figure out things by ourselves so that we are 100% sure that we are doing it better than anyone. It is obviously also the question of standards.

Any great’s company approach has been like that because every great company is profoundly unique and some standards must not be applied everywhere equally. Evidently, there are some exceptions as with financial statements, but they are exceptions. Let’s not fall into trap keeping exceptions in mind while the rule is still the same - do things the way you know are the best for you. However, interestingly, even in accounting, different companies use internally different methods of valuation. For example, Amazon puts all the Research and Development expenses in Operating Expenses which is not accurate by the international standards but they explain simply: “Inventions are in our soul, it is our operations, that’s why they will be kept as operational costs, not R&D“.

Again, in short term we’d better follow the standards because it takes time to pioneer and invent things. But in long run… we will be so better off if we think with our own heads not blindly following standards.
So, let’s challenge the status quo!