« Don’t Blog? Don’t Exist. | Home | What Do Your Visitors REALLY Want? »
Break Your Best Practices Addiction
Are you a “best practices” addict?
No? Are you sure? A lot of good, smart businesspeople are.
I know some very influential company and department heads who have millions of dollars flowing through their budgets, that will believe nearly anything you tell them as long as it is preceded with “According to best practices . . .”
Now, I know I’m gonna get letters about this so, for the record, I’ve never misled anyone by doing that. I am, however, acknowledging that I (or less-scrupulous souls) could have, because too many company stakeholders function at the me-too level and not at the level of testing out other possibilities.
So here’s step one of your 12 Step recovery program for breaking the addiction cycle to “best practices”: read this article.
When I read this article (below is a snippet most germane to this post), it made me slap my knee and howl in laughter at recognizing what I often see:
The Worst Thing About Best Practices
Few “tools” are more widely abused these days than so-called best practices. It’s no wonder that most banks, supermarkets, airlines, retailers and professional services firms look astonishingly similar—they’ve been busy copying each other’s best practices for decades.
What’s most alarming is how ingrained their use has become in the language of marketers, salespeople and customers. Best practices have joined the long list of meaningless phrases like scalable strategies, seamless integration and transformational initiatives.
It’s a rare sales team that doesn’t roll out the best practices—or that closely related cousin, performance benchmarks. Best practices have become a corporate trump card because they supposedly show the best way to do whatever needs to be done.
For me, I do think you need to take into account what had already proven to work because, while you want to be on the cutting edge, you want to make sure it’s not also the bleeding edge. You want to keep making the revenues go up, but not by only adhering to what other people are already doing.
Why not use “best practices” as your baseline, your launching pad and test other approaches that no one else is doing?
You can read the rest of Michael W. McLaughlin’s pithy article by clicking the link below. It does require registration (its free), but if you’re in any discipline or field of work that uses the trance phrase “best practices” — then heed what he says. “Forewarned is forearmed.”
Source: The Worst Thing About Best Practices| MarketingProfs.com
By Walter |
Topics: Client Top Secret, Marketing Mishaps, Pro Analysis |
January 11th, 2007 at 2:32 am
Walter,
You’ve done a great job of pointing out what I’ve been noticing: ‘Best Practices’ has become such an overused phrase in the corporate world that it’s almost become the new way to describe ‘Standard Operating Procedure’. I like the idea of seeing it as doing what you know works, and then blazing your own trail.