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What is a valuable virtue for business practices?

Can certain "best practices" ruin your business?

  • See the following perspective for more background: "Hence, with all the best intentions, executives often implement what is  considered a "best practice" in their industry. What they do not know is  that some of these practices are bad habits masquerading as efficiency boosters, their real consequences lying hidden. Questioning and  uncovering such practices may significantly boost your competitive  advantage, to the benefit of your firm and, eventually, us all." http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/12/which_best_practice_is_ruining.html http://hbr.org/2010/04/column-best-practices-get-you-only-so-far/ar/1 http://www.imd.org/research/challenges/upload/TC007-11-THE-DARK-SIDE-OF-BEST-PRACTICES.pdf

  • Answer:

    In management literature there is this very popular thing, called the business case. The concept is simple. Solution ‘X’ is a current hype, so you look how successful company ‘Y’ is using it, a so-called “best practice”. Or you examine a number of successful companies and you look for what they have in common, a so-called “driver for success”. The problem with approaches like these is that they look at the relationship between business success and a single dimension of the business activity. In addition, such approach also suggests that there is a causal link between that single dimension and the business success. That can be so in the context of that specific company, but it is not guaranteed to be so in your own company’s context. Reality is that successful companies never are successful just because they are excellent in just this single aspect of their business (the so-called best practice). They are successful because they are excellent in nearly every aspects of their business activity. Therefore, on average, adopting a best practice can indeed be ‘good practice’ for your company. However, you have to understand the dependencies that make that such best practice is indeed workable and delivers results in these other companies that were the basis for the definition of it. If some of these dependencies are in conflict with the reality of your own organisation, then you might be on the road to failure.

Marc Buyens at Quora Visit the source

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If not properly considered, absolutely.  “Best practices” of one company can be the downfall of another.  You should observe someone’s “best practice” and either adapt it to your own business or scrap it and look for something else. If I were to accept someone else’s successful actions, I would look for successful actions on organizational basics for survival, such as advertising, marketing, and only in terms of which suggestions to look into.  I may be considered skeptical in this case but I feel it is an important to take responsibility to accept someone’s advice but to also research the validity of the their statements. Personally, I have had the good fortune of having good business advice, but I always applied it to the scale of my own business.  For instance, if you have employees, try to make it a good practice to stay in good communication with them.  There are some schools of thought that would say that the boss just gets to relax and not do anything himself and let others do the work.  That may sound fun but would be short-lived.  A boss who just stands by and lets things happen in his business is likely to be out of business soon or have the business taken over by someone who actually cares about it and the employees. One thing I would suggest doing is make a list of your own “best practices” and every time you get a new one, write it down and file it someplace.  This will help remind you any time you are wondering what to do.  Would someone else’s successful actions really tear another’s business apart?  There is only one way to know for certain and that is to try it out.  But before trying it out, do the needed homework to make sure that your company is secure when trying out something new and don’t drop out old successful actions that have worked until now. Per Wickstrom Founder of Best Drug Rehabilitation http://www.bestdrugrehabilitation.com/

Per Wickstrom

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