The Worst Thing About Best Practices

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by Michael W. McLaughlin
June 21, 2005

Excerpts from an interesting perspective...

Granted, best practices can jog your thoughts and maybe even inspire you. But as a tool for guiding strategic initiatives, it's a real loser. One company's best practice can too easily become another company's sunk cost.

Here are four reasons you should dump best practices:

1. They rarely work. A company's best practices work in the context of its business processes, culture, systems and people. Plucking a best practice and trying to graft it onto another organization will produce unpredictable results.

In one instance, a company forced its entrepreneurial salespeople to adopt a tightly controlled sales process, with automated tools for all large accounts. The company mandated the new process and system because it was touted as a best practice in sales force management. After a year of trial and error, the company's salespeople dumped the tool, complaining about declining sales productivity. For the company, it was a multimillion-dollar mistake.

2. It's a follower's strategy. In an era of demands for innovative products and services, why give your customers recycled answers? A company that really wants a customer order process that looks like everyone else's is likely to lose the battle of market differentiation. Relying on best practices will doom your customers to mediocrity in the long run, and hurt your reputation as well.

3. Change comes from within. People rarely respond well to implementing some other company's ideas. In fact, having best practices come down from on high usually causes resentment. Let people create their own solutions using their in-depth knowledge of the company's customers, suppliers, employees and processes. That will result in ownership of the ideas and determination to get results.

4. They don't come with a manual. Business books and benchmark reports are full of snippets about best practices, yet they rarely explain what to do with them. You may have read that it's a best practice to process a customer product return in 24 hours, but there's little guidance for meeting that objective. It's also quite possible that the organizational change necessary for your customer to achieve the goal isn't even remotely feasible.