Best Practices.

Best practices are here to stay. Peter Drucker famously coined the term “what gets measured gets improved” over 40 years ago. Edward Deming often quipped, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion” and “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” Frederick Winslow Taylor, considered to be the father of Scientific Management, promoted a “Fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” and “Under systemic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and rapidly than even before.” And then there was Igor Ansoff, considered by most to be the father of Strategic Management, who was the first to talk about “paralysis by analysis.” We have Scientific Management, Strategic Management, Systems Thinking, Six Sigma, Operational Effectiveness, Strategic Planning, Business Strategy, Performance Management, Emotional Intelligence, Adversity Intelligence, Multiple Intelligences, Positive Psychology, Bench-marking, Multivariate Analysis, Playbooks, and a plethora of other performance-metric-centered sciences and fancy-lingo that make us the most formidable business environment on the planet – and arguably the best-equipped, 23.8 million managers and executives of any nation-state economy in history.

We mint almost 200,000 MBAs every year in the U.S.; it is now the most popular advanced degree. We appear to know so much - and apply so little. The results prove it. The Small Business Association recently published data revealing that 50% of American businesses fail within the first 5 years and 66% fail within 10 years. The American Enterprise Institute says that only 12% of Fortune 500 companies listed in 1955 remain today. Did they just evaporate? Maybe this is the natural order of things? Are we leveraging Best Practices effectively?   

Some people seem to be better than others at seeking out and applying best practices. There is a well-known theory that every discipline – business, education, politics, sales, entrepreneurship, etc.- always has a top echelon of performers, a so-called Top 3%. These are leaders and standout-performers who seem to magically and consistently demonstrate an abundance of agility in people, learning, change, and results. And they are highly self-aware, and master synthesizers of information and proven success principles. In addition, these so-called 3%’ers always seem to find a way to deliver superior results far beyond what the other 97% of humans in the animal kingdom can deliver. The best rise to the top, or so it seems. The best performers are not necessarily the smartest, most-educated, most-connected, or most-resourced, but rather they appear to be very focused and capable at seeking out best practices and next practices - and applying them effectively to achieve superior results.

Jim Collins and Morten Hansen did a lot excellent research for their business classic, How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In (2009), to find out why some companies perform better in their industry than competitors? (Of course, Jim Collins is one of the most successful business writers of our time, author of Good to Great (2001), Great by Choice (2011), and a number of other classics. He coined the well-used business terms, “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”, “The Hedgehog Principle”, “10Xers”, and “Level 5 Leaders." Innovation, creativity, good management, talent, and agility are definitely important qualities; but Collins and Hansen discovered that the “secret sauce” was more simple: Setting a strong goal - and then executing with “fanatical discipline.” Bench-marking and best practices are critical to that so-called fanatical discipline.

Bench-marking superior performance standards and identifying best practices to achieve superior outcomes represent an important opportunity to make better business decisions, and help avoid making poor business decisions. The Top 3%'ers know this intuitively, and seem to have a black belt in applying best practices in any situation or environment. They are the common threads to most modern business philosophies and processes. An interesting read is a current, national bestseller by Geoff Tuff and Steven Goldbach entitled, Detonate: Why-and How-Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices (and Bring a Beginner’s Mind to Survive (2018). These authors make the case that by this point everyone is practicing best practices, and you are probably doing the exact things that most of your competitors are doing. Seek out the best analytics, bench-marking and best practices as a fanatical discipline. And seek out every Top 3%'er you can find. They drink coffee and know stuff. Winning in a fast-changing, competitive global economy is no simple task these days. That is for sure.

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 good cup of coffee on a leisurely Saturday afternoon.