Performance Shifts.

Innovation and productivity growth are the most powerful engines of human progress. Although the Universe is 14 billion years old - and the Earth is 4.5 billion years old - human civilization has only been "working at progress” for a relatively short 12,000 years. What has the rate of progress looked like? Fresh thinking, new ways to self-organize - and build family units and societies, process improvements, and technological advancements were painfully slow until the last 50 years or so. Change happened at the pace that a tree grows – literally. If our forefathers would have had the benefit of an army of management consultants like we have today - and understood the power of Best Practices - human development and progress could have been accelerated much faster. The world would have experienced a lot more brilliant successes, and far fewer failures. More people could have been pulled out of poverty and misery, and there definitely would have been fewer wars and horrific death across the planet. How have best practices unleashed remarkable human progress in recent times? How can best practices help you realize more of your potential at both work and home?  

Buckminster Fuller, one of the great American thinkers of the last century, created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve.” Fuller noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today different types of knowledge have different rates of growth, for sure. For example, nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years, clinical knowledge every 18 months, and 3D printing technology is doubling every 6 months. But on average human knowledge is now doubling every 13 months. (Moore's Law is quickly becoming irrelevant.) According to IBM, the build out of  the “Internet of Things” will lead to the doubling of human knowledge every 12 hours sometime during the next decade. This phenomenal rate of change requires a new way of learning, understanding patterns, adapting to change, and applying the best thinking and proven practices to meet both the challenges and opportunities of our Brave New World. Management Consultants play an important role in our economy and currently help us navigate through this process - and ensure we avoid The Sirens singing beautiful words and music from the rocky shores. In the future, these consultants will play an even more important role in the successful innovation, growth and success as we continue to be a leading country in the world.

The “White Shoe” business, known today as Management Consulting, first emerged in 1886 when Arthur D. Little started the first technical consulting company in America. In 1893, Frederick Winslow Taylor opened an independent consulting practice in Philadelphia. Many of us know Taylor as the father of "Scientific Management" and the Efficiency Movement. Most MBA programs around the world continue to study Taylorism and his book, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Taylor invented the first method for studying and organizing work, setting benchmarks to improve productivity, and set the stage for the accelerated growth and relevancy of management consultants in the 1930s, 1950s, and then the 1980s and 2000s. He established the foundations and paved the way for important and famous business consultants in more recent years including Peter Drucker, Edward Deming, Tom Peters, and Jim Collins. These prominent gentlemen and business thinkers, and a large group of lesser known names, probably had more direct impact on the growth of the U.S. economy in the last hundred years than most others. Today there are more than 600,000 Americans who work in some segment of the $150 billion management consulting industry, and 30 of the largest and most prominent consulting firms have more than 1,000 consultants. McKinsey is the most successful and prestigious firm in the world, followed by The Boston Consulting Group, and then Bain and Company. Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG are a few of the others considered to be in the Top 10. These firms focus mostly on sales and marketing, operational improvements, and implementing new technology, and are usually focused on the most profitable industries including pharmaceuticals, healthcare, transportation, and information technology. They all have a large and growing toolbox of models, case studies, proven execution plans, and insights that play an important role in organizations and leadership teams acting sharper and swifter, more disciplined, and with greater speed and success than ever before. It is important for leaders to be students of these great consultancy firms, and to study their ideas, tools and approaches used to assess and understand a business challenge, and how they help their clients map out a thoughtful strategy and execution plan to win in a competitive global marketplace. Two excellent books for the reading list of other management consulting-wannabes should be Key Management Models: The 60+ Models Every Manager Needs to Know (Van Assen, Van Den Berg, Pietersma, 2009), and The McKinsey Way (Ethan Rasiel, 1999.) A fun read to learn about the birth and growth of the industry is captured in Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World (Walter Kiechel, 2010).

Best Practices – the proven ideas and execution elements captured from broad and deep experiences across many industries and businesses, are one of the approaches that these leading consulting companies use to map out a successful plan with their clients. Learning from the successes and failures from others is a powerful force in the universe. Best Practices are the collection of methodologies, processes, rules, concepts and theories that are proven to work. No need to recreate the wheel. You clearly identify what the best, achievable standards are by the best people and teams, and establish their mindsets, capabilities, skills, resources, and execution plans as the new standards of excellence for the organization. Goals, training and coaching investments, and incentives are built around these new, higher levels of excellence and expectation. Capable leaders can leverage this focus and achieve a "shift in the middle" to a higher level of performance and achievement. All boats rise in the harbor. A simple concept on paper, and a lot more challenging to make happen on the street level. Best Practices have been benchmarked within an industry, and Next Practices are those best practices and standards of excellence that are benchmarked across other related or unrelated industries. If leaders are paying attention and focused on shaping a winning strategy, benchmarking and applying best practices are powerful tools that help them make better decisions and achieve a higher level of success.

The thought of technology and human knowledge doubling every 13 months is a scary proposition. It is a serious threat to the majority of business models and the 19,000 large private and public corporations in America. Our country has an impressive number of unique competitive advantages including tremendous resources, human capital, entrepreneurial energy and spirit, diversity, world-class educational institutions, democracy and a free enterprise system, and the superior and numerous management consulting firms and talent. America has demonstrated the best of the best across a large range of disciplines. Our next chapter is being written as we speak; we need it to be a story of growth, advancement and success for all participants in both the "American Experiment" and the global community of citizens. May we ensure that benchmarking and the application of best practices is always one of our most admired and abundant strengths. There is so much brilliant human potential to realize in front of us. I see it in the eyes and hearts of my children. Let's all reach for it. Get ready. Go.

Let's Create More Sparks: Robert is a curious Irish-Canadian and well-traveled American who naturally enjoys story telling that includes lots of interesting facts and figures. Stats and data points help tell powerful stories. Interesting quotes and good books bring vivid colors and memorable shapes to a story. Good stories inspire the human spirit. Ideally you found an idea or two in this LinkedIn article that you can now use as a fantastic conversation starter with friends or colleagues over a coffee on a leisurely Saturday afternoon.