A talented musician friend told me a story that went something like this… When learning a classical piece for guitar, my friend didn’t want to follow Segovia’s fingerings. Being a headstrong youngster, my friend had his own ideas about how to play the piece, but his guitar teacher just wasn’t having it.
“Segovia was a genius,” the guitar teacher said. “Are you a genius?”
The lesson here is obvious: If you are working on a piece of music that is several hundred years old, and a recognized master figured how to best to perform it, you would be best served doing it his way—unless you happen to be a genius.
If we were to broaden that lesson, we might add: If you are doing something technical, there is probably one really good way to do it and a multitude of not-as-good ways. So, go with the one really good way.
But what if you are doing something as open-ended and unpredictable as running a business? While there may be best practices
when it comes to accounting or wiring your phone system, are there really unassailable best practices for developing products, setting prices, hiring people, and planning for the future?
Some general guidelines exist (e.g., “Make sure more money comes in than goes out”). My gut feeling, though, is that for every specific business, best practices can rarely be applied as is; they always have to be adapted and modified to fit the specific context.
I say this for two reasons. First of all, when I’m moderating seminars here at MarketingProfs, our presenters invariably get questions that have to be answered with the simple phrase, “It depends.”
What kind of resources should I apply to social media? Do I need to get a marketing automation system? Should I be on Twitter? Do I need a blog? How big should my email list be?
It depends. The answer depends on your business, on your competition, on your resources, on your goals, and so on. In other words, it depends on the context, which brings me to my second reason for calling the practice of following best practices into question.
In the book Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World, Jamie Notter and my guest on this week’s episode of Marketing Smarts, Maddie Grant, put it rather bluntly: “Best practices are evil.”
According to Notter and Grant, the problem with best practices is that they are abstracted from context, and as their book argues, “With the speed of the social media revolution, the context is changing faster than we can adapt our best practices.”
If best practices are context-dependent, and the context is rapidly changing, then we need to do something different. Notter and Grant suggest that, rather than “looking backward” at what others have done, we should instead look forward and focus instead on innovation. Because the problems we’re facing are new, don’t the solutions need to be new as well?
So, what do you think? Are best practices stupid and evil?
If you’d like to hear my entire conversation with Maddie Grant, you can listen here, or subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes and never miss an episode. Thanks for listening!
(Photo courtesy of Bigstock: Man Thinking)
Tags: best practices, change management, Jamie Notter, Maddie Grant, Marketing Strategy, Social Media
Interesting perspective. I still think the abstracted best practice provides a base for building.
For many people it’s easier to sculpt a human face by adding on to or altering a featureless mannequin head than by carving away at a block of wood to free the face beneath.
Following best practice blindly = evil, sure.
But using them to avoid reinventing the wheel for an aspect of your business where that’s not necessary or you need to pick something and get started or a number of other scenarios… Sounds like a good idea to me.
In other words … wait for it ……………. it depends.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Ha!
I think everyone is in agreement that we shouldn’t “reinvent the wheel” (or should we?).
The issue is, though, figuring out what is a wheel and what isn’t. For certain tasks we must perform, enough people have done them for accepted, best practices to emerge. There are best practices for setting bones, pouring foundations, maintaining your books, playing a Bach sonata, and so on.
But there are other tasks for which we only really have “suggested approaches,” rather than best practices. These are tasks like coming up with an idea for a business, writing a song, choosing a career, developing an economic policy, talking to a friend, and so on.
If best practices are “evil,” it’s when they are applied in such a way as to treat a relatively open, complex and unpredictable process as a closed, predictable, mechanical process.
Of course, the genius of humanity has always been to discover predictable processes in seemingly chaotic systems. This means that sometimes people can make a reasonable case for treating a human process (customer service calls, sales calls, responding to complaints) as a mechanical process, and insist that there really is a best practice for everything (and who knows, maybe there is).
The important thing to remember is that this genius itself relies on a very open-ended best practice: experimentation. I call this an open-ended best practice because, while there are best practices for running experiments, etc., there is no best practice for figuring out the problem or set of problems you want to study and solve.
Or is there?
[...] interviewing Maddie Grant back in May, I wrote a post that asked, “Are best practices [...]
[...] interviewing Maddie Grant back in May, I wrote a post that asked, “Are best-practices [...]