What is the price for reliability? 

A lot.  People are willing to pay far more for products, services, or even people if they know they can count on? To deliver the results, I mean.

I know because when we sell servers, corporations typically are willing to pay a lot to get 99% reliability.  They are willing to pay much more to get 99.9% reliability, and even multiples more to pump that up to 99.99% or even 99.999%.

Now, look at the products we work with.  How much would you pay for a calculator that will give you the right answer 99 percent of the time?  What about a calculator that gives you the right answer 99.9% of the time?  I reckon a calculator is worthless unless it gives you the right answer 100% of the time.

Look at a car.  How much is the value of the car which statistically will conk out once every 100 starts? 

I guess employers and managers are constantly looking at people they can wholly trust, and the more they can count on the person, the more valuable he becomes.  That is why maybe good  enough is not good enough ( to get a high responsibility or fast promotion).

Remember, your worth to the company can ( if you take the analogy) become way much more if you can be counted on 99.99% of the time, instead of 98% of the time.

In this time and age, when everything is commoditized, it is actually after breaching the bar of excellence and becoming reliable or excellent ahead of 99% of the pack that you can radically increase your value.

If everybody’s average is 98%, then you are way ahead if you can hit 99%, and even way better if you can hit 99.9%.

If everybody good can run the 100 meter dash in 11 seconds, then every one hundredth of a second  that you can improve over 11 seconds becomes very eventful in your worth.