Always looking for ‘best practices’ stifles innovation
I’ve been seeing a lot of the Best Practices Guy lately. If you’ve been in the work world long enough, you’re probably familiar with this person: he or she is the one at any and every meeting whose only real contribution to the discussion is to harp on the need to look at “best practices.” Before we can do anything, Best Practices Guy argues, we need to determine what everyone else is doing.
And then, presumably, we’ll just copy them. Because that’s how profits are made.
There’s nothing wrong with keeping your eyes open and making sure you’re up on the latest trends, conventions and breakthroughs, but the problem with Best Practices People is that they’re usually the one who isn’t at all. If they knew what the “best practices” were, they’d probably mention it. Instead, they just continuously request that someone else do the research and report back.
I keep putting “best practices” in quotes because it’s really one of those empty-headed phrases that sounds like it means more than it actually does. If I were to tell you the best way to make scrambled eggs, I’d sound informal, casual and cool. If I were to say I had with me the “best practices for scrambled eggs” I’d come off sounding not unlike a corporate wannabe tool.
Best Practices Guy isn’t always a tool. Usually the intentions are good, but in a roundabout way. The problem with the type of person I’m describing is that he or she is often motivated almost entirely by fear. It’s not so much research they crave, but safety. If we just do what someone else has done (and succeeded with) we thus have no risk of failure.
That’s boring. Maybe it’s a good strategy in a fiscally conservative kind of way. But it’s BORING. And boredom is not a desirable trait for a company. Boring companies already have trouble attracting talent, and, in the information age and with Generation Y being kind of difficult to work with (I hear), they’re likely not going to have much time for boredom either.
Innovation can’t happen when you limit yourself to ‘best practices’. The companies who have recently seen success have been the ones who have been willing to brazenly eschew established practices. Look at Apple with the mp3 player, Nintendo with the Wii, Google with Internet Advertising and even smaller companies like Moleskine with notebooks or Threadless with T-shirts. While these companies undoubtedly understand the marketplace, I guarantee that the top brass don’t sit around worrying about ‘best practices’.
Innovation can’t happen if you’re always looking to adhere to ‘best practices’. Let’s shut that Best Practices Guy up.
Tags: apple, corporate bs, google, language, moleskine, nintendo, threadless, wii
Related: March 30, 2008: The modern workplace: Creation and Collaboration | January 27, 2008: Look at me: I’m not being Narcissistic | March 16, 2008: Five barriers to the paperless office |
Matt,
as a Gen-Xer working, I couldn’t agree with you more. Actually, I may go further than you.
As a college studying Industrial Engineering, I spent a lot of time studying benchmarking. It was specifically linked to time and motion studies. I personally worked in a foundry timing how workers ground metal using a stop watch and clipboard, we benchmarked the most efficient worker. Broke down the sub-movements he used and trained others to use those exact movements to grind metal coming from the exact same mold. It all made perfect sense.
When I got into the business world, like you, I heard people talking at benchmarking business processes and it made NO sense. How could use a stop watch and clipboard and a break a business process down into a series of sub-movements to be replicated by others doing exactly the same thing?
My complete opposition to benchmarking and best practices came reading one of Warren Buffett’s annual reports where he described the “‘institutional imperative:’ the tendency of executives to mindlessly imitate the behavior of their peers…”
However you want to describe it: benchmarking, best practices or the institutional imperative, why not call it what it really is? Laziness. Stupid, lazy managers, who often like to call themselves leaders, try and copy other people’s receipts for success. Rather than studying, thinking about and refining their own processes, structures and systems for getting work done, they hope to copy someone else’s ‘best practices’ and see magical improvement.
Instead of calling them ‘best practices’, wouldn’t a better term be ’stupid, lazy leaders’? And if you have stupid lazy leaders, is it any surprise that you don’t get much innovation?
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