The five P's of underwriting: those who would underwrite life applicants need to keep learning, work with partners, and maintain their integrity.

The P's stand alone ... that is, as benchmarks of fulfilling the mission of the 21st century home office underwriter. What, then, are these demarcations that set pros apart from the herd? Actually, there are just five. And each packs a wallop.

* Prowess. The elements coming to bear on insurability are in perpetual motion. Yesterday's database doesn't resonate with tomorrow's challenges. Standing pat--where new knowledge is concerned--is a harbinger of obsolescence.

In the final analysis,"cutting edge" equates to fluency in one's discipline. Our track record here leaves something to be desired. Learning is repeatedly triaged in favor of production, even when it is unspeakably clear that "production" in the absence of learning catalyzes poor outcomes and drives up the cost of reinsurance. Sadly, it doesn't have to be this way.

* Prudence. This follows from prowess, reflecting on manifestly imprudent decisions to sacrifice learning, networking and connectivity for the sake of a trivial sack of coins. As chief financial officers go their merry way, indiscriminately picking low-hanging fruit, underwriters gasp in silent horror as their meager funds for education and travel are sacrificed at the alter of "cost containment" A functional definition of pennywise and poundfoolish.

This underwriter is visibly distressed to encounter more and more ominous errors when conducting audits. They are not the product of lapses in judgment. Rather, they reflect a disconcerting lack of insight fueled by the clinical absence of new information and contemporary knowledge.

Prudence equates to seeing the issue of travel to appropriate business events and the procurement of effective continuing education as matters of priority, not piddling away comparative pocket change.

* Partnership. There are no ivory towers. We are all in this together. Your pain is my pain, just as your success is also mine. These simple truths--in a perfect world-would define the interface between underwriter, producer and customer.

After speaking to hundreds of producer gatherings, this much, to me, is clear: Giving lip service to "partnership with the field" while shunning obligate return phone calls and watching pending business age like cheese for want of sometimes necessary medical records is flat out antithetic to our mission as home office underwriters.

If ever there were two occupations enmeshed in one another's success, it would be home office underwriter and producer. Those who recognize this abiding partnership, thrive; those who decry it, languish.

Partnership is that simple and that crucial.

* Pride. A table six is not a table four. All the gnashing of teeth and renting of garments cannot make it so. The words "preferred" and "diabetic" have no place in the same sentence, unless they share space with the word "not"!

These aren't reeds stiffening against a rising wind. They're sober realities of risk assessment. The underwriter who has pride (not to mention, honor) would never stoop to transmogrifying dishwater into cognac at the pleasure of the chief marketing officer.

There are sound judgments, honest mistakes and then that third entity: the unspoken-of stepchild of stress-mediated capitulation to those bent on corrupting long-term outcome for short-term gain. This would be paradoxical if it were not so oppressive to an industry whose products define a long-term relationship.

You either have your pride intact or you are desolate, professionally speaking. There is no middle ground.

* Progress. Chiseled into marble on the wall of the seventh floor of the main building of my insurance alma mater are these words: "He who stops getting better, ceases being good: Simple phrase, powerful concept, Who would deny that we are in a time of frenetic change, affecting every aspect of our environment? In consideration of which, settling into a perpetual "deer-in-headlights" posture assures that one's accountabilities will lie fallow.

As innovations such as teleunderwriting have demonstrated, standing pat, smack dab in latter decades of the last century, doesn't cut it. Ponderous (treadmill stress test), odious (chest x-ray) and onerous (M. D. exam) antiquities must take a knee if we are to accommodate the expectations of today: to be faster, to be cheaper and to be better.

Impeding progress by sustaining fixed false beliefs (they call them delusions in proper psychiatric parlance) begets, in the end, only heightened stress, coming from hither ("why are we not competitive?") and from yon ("why does it cost us twice as much and take twice as long as in Company X?").

Hank George is the principal in his own consulting and training firm, Hank George Inc. He may be reached at [e-mail].