| Blog
& Buzz
Join
Michael McLaughlin for the following
presentations:
May
12 - no-cost Webinar, “Guerrilla
Marketing for Consultants.”
May
15-17, San Francisco, CA,
Product Management Educational Conference:
Pricing
the Invisible, will cover aspects
of pricing professional services,
including value-based pricing.
June
7-10, 2005, Phoenix, AZ,
Association of Proposal Management
Professionals Conference: Differentiation:
What Works, What Doesn’t, and
How to Make the Most of It.
Tips
1-4 of 25
Tips to Become a Great Consultant.
Guerrilla Consulting Blog,
April 2005
What's
the Best Advice You Ever Got?
Guerrilla Consulting Blog,
4/29/05
The
fastest way to alienate clients is
to try to bullsh*t them. Guerrilla
Consulting Blog, 4/27/05
Companies
with high employee morale outperform
others. Guerrilla Consulting
Blog, 4/17/05
Wear
shiny shoes. Guerrilla Consulting
Blog, 4/6/05
Law
Practice Today, There
Must be 50 Ways to Lose a Sale,
April 2005
Law
Practice Today, Why Guerrilla
Consultants Need Great Web Sites,
April 2005
|
| Additional
Resources for Consultants
Management
Consulting News
Interviews with consulting leaders,
articles, research results, job data,
and news. This month:
» Interview:
Blue
Ocean Strategy authors W. Chan
Kim and Renée Mauborgne on
making your competition irrelevant.
»
Articles: Annual
Survey of Independent Consultants,
Business Process Outsourcing, prospects
for telecom consultants, and the looming
talent crisis.
Guerrilla
Consulting Web site
Guerrilla
Consulting blog |
|
The
Guerrilla Consultant –
a newsletter dedicated to applying the principles
of Guerrilla Marketing to the work and lives of
consultants.
Why
Best Practices Aren’t
Like
reengineering and TQM, best practices are frayed
at the edges from use. In client situations, your
liberal use of best practices may label you as
uncreative and lazy.
This month we’ll look at best practices
and tell you why you should rethink how you use
the term and the tool.
Enjoy the article.
Mike
McLaughlin
Co-Author, Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants
The
Worst Thing about Best Practices
A
colleague asked me to review a client proposal
and, at first glance, it looked like a winner.
The proposal was short, and it laid out the client’s
problem in clear, crisp language. Plus, the team
was a great match for the project. I thought,
how refreshing—a jargon-free, informative
proposal.
Then I read the section describing how the team
planned to complete the work and groaned inwardly:
the project approach was to rely on the use of
“best practices.”
“You don’t really mean this,
do you?”
“Look, the client says it right here in
the request for proposal,” my colleague
said. “They asked us to bring best practices
to the project. We won’t win the work without
them.”
I resisted the urge to scream.
Few consulting “tools” are more widely
abused these days than so-called best practices.
It’s no wonder most banks, supermarkets,
airlines, retailers, and consulting firms look
astonishingly similar—they’ve been
busy copying each other’s best practices
for decades.
What’s
most alarming is how ingrained their use has become
in the language of consultants and clients.
Best practices have joined the long list of meaningless
phrases like scalable strategies, seamless integration,
and transformational initiatives.
It’s
a rare project team that doesn’t roll out
the best practices—or that closely related
cousin, performance benchmarks. Best practices
have become a corporate trump card because they
supposedly show the best way to do whatever needs
to be done.
Of
course, there is value in learning from the experience
and success of others. It’s natural for
the business community to recognize the innovative
solutions or services an organization comes up
with to untangle a problem or create a market
opportunity. Many organizations are saddled with
similar challenges, so copying may seem like the
ultimate shortcut to salvation.
|
“Few consulting “tools”
are more widely abused these days than so-called
best practices.” |
United
Airlines, for example, saw the potential in what
low-cost airlines were doing, so its executives
created a new airline, TED, which is a carbon
copy of their low-cost competitors’ best
practices.
What’s
wrong with this picture?
The
problem with best practices is this: that approach
lulls people into thinking that a best practice
really exists that can be successfully transplanted.
Starting
any project with a canned solution stifles the
innovation clients pay consultants 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. If you start
with a pre-determined solution, it’s easy
to gloss over more innovative approaches.
Granted, best practices can jog your thoughts
and maybe even inspire you. But as a tool for
guiding strategic initiatives, it’s a real
loser. One company’s best practice can too
easily become another company’s sunk cost.
Here are four reasons you should 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.
In one instance, a company forced its entrepreneurial
salespeople to adopt a tightly controlled sales
process, with automated tools for all large
accounts. The company mandated the new process
and system because it was touted as a best practice
in sales force management. After a year of trial
and error, the company’s salespeople dumped
the tool, complaining about declining sales
productivity. For the company, it was a multi-million
dollar mistake.
It’s a follower’s strategy.
In an era of demands for innovative products
and services, why give your clients recycled
answers? A client 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 clients
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. Let people create their own
solutions using their in-depth knowledge of
the company’s customers, suppliers, employees,
and processes. That will result in ownership
of the 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 24 hours, but there’s
little guidance for meeting that objective.
It’s also quite possible that the organizational
change necessary for your client to achieve
the goal isn’t even remotely feasible.
So
now what?
On your next project, ask your team to put best
practices aside, at least at the outset. Direct
the team to thoroughly explore what needs to be
done and why, before jumping to the question of
how you will do it.
Pull out the best practices only after you’ve
come up with preliminary ideas for solving the
problem. Maybe they will spark concepts you can
adapt, and maybe not.
Develop your own best solutions to fit the context
of the client’s business. Use another company’s
best practices only as a last resort.
What
are your experiences with best practices?
Join
the discussion over at the Guerrilla Consulting
blog and let me know. |
