Best Practices

Best Practices - not so much.

First, there's nothing as ingrained as an bad idea. You can re-brand it, re-name it, tweak the details, but it's still the same old bad idea. You learn in business school that strategic management is implemented through the use of business rules, and a business rule is a constraint on an aspect of your business. Business rules, unfortunately, are often the result of benchmarking best practices. Equally unfortunate, "though shalt benchmark and implement best practices" is often also a business rule. Clearly we need to define optimums, maintain metrics, and so forth. What get's my goat is the "constraints" part of the equation.

Second, if people are going to define a "best practice", and they will, I don't want to be the one chasing the "best". I want to be the one they're trying to catch up with. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, after all.

Just because a methodology worked for another company doesn't necessarily mean it will work for yours. A business is a microcosm of interconnected factors; culture, model, strategy, processes, operations, etc. It worked at the other company because it meshed with their overall business environment. You can implement the same strategy and tactics and not achieve the same results because the underlying and interconnected factors aren't aligned.

What made the strategy successful is often not as obvious as it may seem. Want to lead a successful basket ball team? Win a record breaking 902 NCAA career games? The most obvious thing to benchmark would be the most visible. Bobby Knight threw chairs, cussed profusely, was arrested for assault, and was accused of choking a player. Not a "best practice" to implement. What wasn't as obvious was that his programs were among the cleanest in the league and under his leadership his programs were never sanctioned for recruiting violations. What made him successful was the way he lead his teams. His plays required his players to work together, to take a disciplined approach, and to be unselfish.

Ever heard the saying "if you're not the lead dog the view never changes"? How about "Eat Shit. 100 billion flies can't be wrong"? Be creative, lead the pack, and be the best.