I hate established coding standards, they're all concerned with either telling you not to make a few silly mistakes, or telling you how to format your code in some way or another. All of which are trivialities.
I mean, they will tell you how many spaces to put between operators, how to case your variables, what 'hungarian-style' prefixes to use (eg _ for members), conflicting advice (eg you cannot call a class Cxyz but you must call an interface Ixyz), how to layout your code (put your variable at the top of the class or at the bottom)
All are useless in the big picture.
What matters to write effective, maintainable and readable code is never mentioned in these standards.
For example: do you put your variables at the top or the bottom of your class? Well, who cares - what does matter is if you group your variables together by functional area. That matters (you'll know this if you've ever seen 20 variables scattered about the place).
They tell you to put your curly brackets in certain places. Big deal! I can read code in both K&R and ANSI style bracketing, it doesn't matter. What does matter is if all Window classes are differentiated somehow (like being suffixed with Form or Dlg or whatever) so you can see which files contain window code and which are ordinary objects.
Stuff like this matters far more than the minor points that standards usually contain. I don't know why they developed like this, but often they're just a ton of rules that get in the way of effective, productive coding.
My standards try to focus more on organisation of code and files. We have certain standards that refer to where files will be found. For example, for the non-dev guys can look at one of our projects and immediately pick up the documentation files they need. Similarly, we try to layout the project code in as similar a manner to other projects as practical (note: as practical, not in a heavily-proscribed manner that may not be appropriate all the time) and basically we try to make standards guidelines that can be modified as needed.
In short - they're there to help us work together, not as a set of restrictive rules that always have to be followed.