Better Than Best Practices

Many agencies today lead off their presentations with a sworn pledge of understanding and following “best practices” in emarketing, advertising, website design, and more. And B2B companies seem to like it. Why not? Best practices have become a corporate trump card because they supposedly show the best way to do whatever needs to be done.

Of course, everyone finds value in learning from the experience and success of others. Enewsletters from MarketingSherpa or MarketingProfs disseminate this information to readers, who simply can’t get enough of it. It's natural for businesses to recognize the innovative solutions or services an organization develops to untangle a problem or create a market opportunity. Since many organizations are saddled with similar challenges, copying practices may seem like the ultimate shortcut to salvation.

But few agency consulting "tools" are more widely abused these days than so-called best practices, which have joined the long list of meaningless phrases like scalable strategies, seamless integration, and transformational initiatives.

What's wrong with this picture?

The problem with relying on industry best practices is that this approach lulls people into thinking that a best practice really exists and that it can be successfully transplanted.

Starting any project with a canned solution stifles the innovation clients pay agencies to provide. When you import best practices, the team's thinking immediately focuses on how to do the work, rather than first addressing what should be done and why. When you start with a pre-determined solution, it's easy to gloss over more innovative approaches.

Granted, best practices can jog everyone’s thoughts and perhaps provide inspiration. But as a tool for guiding strategic initiatives, this approach often represents a losing proposition. One company's best practice can too easily become another company's wasted expense.

Four reasons to dump best practices

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.
It's a follower's strategy. In an era of demands for innovative products and services, why start with 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 company to mediocrity in the long run.
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. Letting people create their own solutions, using their in-depth knowledge of the company's customers, suppliers, employees, and processes, results in ownership of ideas and determination to get results.
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 twenty-four hours, but there's little guidance for meeting that objective. It's also quite possible that the organizational change necessary for your company to achieve the goal isn't even remotely feasible.