Tag Archives: best practices

Good Advice Often Makes Bad Things Happen

Advice, Leadership,

Mike Myatt, who writes on leadership, says it straight. In a post titled Really Bad Advice, he first sets the scene:

I just finished reading an article where the author (a self professed innovation guru) recommended strategy be aligned with capability, and that to allow ambition to exceed capability is a nothing short of a recipe for disaster.

And then he tears into that: 

Let me get right to it – if you want to fail as a leader then please follow the flawed advice given by the wizard of innovation mentioned in the opening paragraph. But if you want to rise above the crowd and become a truly innovative leader, I’d ask you to regard said advice for what it is – more of the same. It’s just another well-intentioned sound bite that will destroy your company and your career if you choose to follow it.

The underlying problem, much more general than Mike’s specific issue, is quite common: Good advice makes bad things happen. Business, like life itself, is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Every case is different. What worked for me could easily be disastrous for you. I’m flattered when people ask my advice, but I’m always hoping they have the common sense to listen, digest, evaluate my story for their situation, and execute on it only if it actually makes sense for them, then, in their situation. I shudder when it seems like people are going to just execute on my advice without internalizing first. 

Meanwhile, back with the specific issue on strategy, Mike puts his objection very clearly: 

leaders who complain about a lack of resources, are simply communicating they are not very resourceful. Great leaders find a way to develop and/or acquire the best capability in order to create a certainty of execution around a winning strategy. If you want to fail as a leader, hire B and C talent and ask them to win with an inferior strategy. Thinking in a limited manner will only accomplish one thing – it will limit your future.

That too, I think, is good advice that might or might not apply to some other situation. To be taken in moderation, and used with care.

Conclusion: This goes straight to my general feeling that there are no such things as best practices. 

(Image: bigstockphoto.com)

The Sad Truth About Best Practices

Back to Fundamentals, Personal Productivity, , ,

… is that most of the time, they won’t work for you or me. They worked for somebody, some time, in some situation, in the past. Sure, the idea of best practices is attractive. Supposedly you or I can follow along, obediently, and succeed using so-called best practices. Too bad it doesn’t work.

For example, Jim Collins’ blockbuster business book Good to Great, published in 2001, featured 11 supposedly great companies. All of them did extraordinarily well on the stock market for 10-20 years. But by 2008, when Steven Levitt posted Good to Great to Below Average on Freakonomics, two of them had died. He wrote:

Nine of the eleven companies remain more or less intact. Of these, Nucor is the only one that has dramatically outperformed the stock market since the book came out. Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay. Overall, a portfolio of the “good to great” companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500.

I don’t mean to criticize Jim Collins, his book, or his methodology. I do mean to question the whole idea of so-called best practices. There are so many built-in problems. What works in one case is hard to translate to the next case. It’s different times, places, people, resources, problems, and so forth.

The best use of the so-called best practices is as generator of new practices, new ideas, new possibilities for you, in your business, that you might be able to take in, digest, and adopt to your situation. It’s a lot like business cases and business stories, not intended as recipes to be followed, but rather as examples of what other people did.

However, you have to be careful. Don’t ever just blindly follow. You always think about it, consider the options, how it might be different in your case, and then, if it still sounds good, try it. Carefully.

If I ever give you any advice, I want you to please never take it without thinking first, analyzing, and deciding for yourself whether or not, and how, and to what extent what I say fits your situation.