Welcome to The Unstandardized
The Unstandardized is a publication about standards, power, and markets, without the institutional complacency.
It is for people who work in standardization, with standards professionally, for regulators, companies, and policy circles, and for those who sense that this hidden infrastructure now matters far beyond compliance checklists.
What you’ll find here
When you subscribe to The Unstandardized you will have access to:
Essays that unpack the political economy of standardization, from WTO rules and EU regulation to U.S., Chinese, and global strategies for technical influence.
Analysis of how standards organizations are changing (governance, funding models, digitalization, conflicts of interest and the tension between “public good” language and commercial reality).
Reflections on fragmentation, interoperability, and what happens when global consensus starts to fray.
The tone is analytical, less academic paper, more field notes from someone who has spent years inside the machinery and is now willing to talk plainly about how it works.
Who I am
I have spent most of my career in and around international standardization, in senior leadership roles, including Secretary-General of ISO. I have chaired committees, negotiated governance reforms, survived budget debates, and helped design strategies that shaped how standards are produced, sold, and referenced in law.
Today I am working as a strategic advisor, board member, and writer, with businesses, governments and standards bodies as clients. The Unstandardized is the opportunity to share lived experience with a broader audience of practitioners, policy‑makers, and curious insiders who want to understand both the formal story and the informal reality of standardization.
Why subscribe
By subscribing you will get:
Regular essays that go beyond surface commentary and explain the system logic behind individual news items.
A practitioner’s perspective on what proposed reforms, new regulations, or institutional changes will actually do in practice.
Occasional deep dives on business models, governance experiments, and the future of the international standards “industry.”
Over time, paid support will also make it possible to experiment with additional formats, such as interviews with key actors, explainers for specific regulatory files, or annotated “case dossiers” on important standards battles.
If your work touches standards, regulation, conformity assessment, or global trade, or if you are simply standard‑curious and tired of sanitized narratives, you will find The Unstandardized a useful, and occasionally provocative, companion.
Subscribe and join The Unstandardized community
Join and subscribe to get full access to The Unstandardized. You will never miss an update as every new post is sent directly to your email. You will also have access to the full publication archives.
Share your interests and expertise in standardization by joining the community and participating in the comments section, or simply support “The Unstandardized” with a subscription.
