We’ve all heard about how calamitously insufficient a quality standard of 99 percent would be:

• One percent of airplanes crashing on take-off would mean nearly 200 domestic commercial airline crashes each day.
• One percent of erroneously filled prescriptions would mean about 35 million incorrect medications dispensed in the United States every year.
• One percent of newborns dropped in obstetrics wards would mean… Well, you get the point.

Familiar stuff, right? So familiar, in fact, that the examples above have pretty much stopped doing the useful work they once did to shock us out of a sense of complacency. I don’t mean to sound cold or callous, but nowadays when I hear statistics like those, my reaction is less “Wow!” and more “Yeah? So?”

Here’s an example that gets my attention, and it’s real. I heard it directly from a corporal in the U.S. Army. He said, “If the system doesn’t work, the mission fails. My buddies die. I die.”

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