Did I mislead a mid-level marketing manager about ISO 9000 in the 1990s?
From July 2025
I have spent much the past few decades encouraging companies to take technology standards seriously in order to increase efficiency, reduce risk and enable scale. I have also sought to live my professional life with an astringent honesty -- not only trying to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may, but also seeking to communicate clearly and avoid any misunderstanding.
Yet back when I was just a pup, wearing an off-the-rack suit (of all things) to a business meeting, I used misdirection to subvert a question about technology standards. I amused myself with my cleverness, but I didn’t do the honorable thing -- even if I have light-heartedly recounted the experience many times over the years.
Just after college I was the chief technologist of a tiny little company that built on-line demos, tutorials and product catalogs for media and technology companies. And when I say “on-line” I mean delivered on a CD-ROM or floppy disk. (For our younger readers, before you consumed software via the Internet...oh, never mind!)
My boss took me to a meeting with a potential client, a mid-level marketing manager at a legacy technology company. We had a great discussion; he explained what he wanted from a CD-ROM based product catalog. I demoed our platform. We started to talk about how we might work together. My boss and started started to think we’d get the business. Then we got hit with one more question.
“I think,” the mid-level marketing manager said, “that ISO9000 is very important -- and don’t want to work with any partner that isn’t ISO9000 compliant. Are you ISO9000 compliant?”
Why the bloody hell did he care about ISO9000? It’s a quality management framework you use to build navigational systems for airplanes or embedded systems for medical devices. Only a lunatic would apply it in a small project to build a CD-ROM based product catalog.
I answered truthfully: “We are not ISO9000 compliant.”
Our prospective client frowned.
I continued: “Instead, we’re ISO9660 compliant. We believe that’s much more relevant to this type of project.”
Our prospective client smiled. You could see him thinking, “ISO9660? The must be 660 better than ISO9000.”
The meeting ended on a high note. We agreed to meet the next week to finalize a statement of work.
Back in the parking lot, my boss said, “James you can’t like to people like that.”
“I didn’t like to anyone,” I replied.
My boss looked at me with exasperation. “We’re not ISO9660 compliant,” he said.
I nodded my head. “Hell, yes, we are.”
I continued: “You know CD-ROM burner that takes up half my desk and we will use to ship builds to the client?”
Now my boss nodded his head.
And I kept going: “The standard for CD-ROM based file systems is ... ISO9660. We will have to use it to burn CDs for the client. ISO9000 is totally irrelevant to the work we do. ISO9660 at least allows us to get builds to the client.”
My boss just shook his head we went back to the car.
I’ve thought about that meeting quite a lot over the years. Did I owe the truth to the mid-level marketing manager, despite his naivete and silliness? Or did I do him a favor by preventing him from getting tripped up on a spurious requirement?
Did I help my boss win an important contract? Or did I do him a disservice by taking a silly risk just to show how clever I could be? If the marketing manager had just one more question -- “Tell me more about ISO9660” -- that would have blown up the meeting.
I have been in many similar situations in the years since. I like to think I have handled them very differently than I did in my early 20s.