How Best Practices Can Get You a Better Meal
Evan
Berglund -- July 12, 2005
It's early morning, and you're sitting around the cave contemplating
the group's need for nutrition. You know you have to go out and hunt today, and
maybe pick some berries if you can find them. However, only a few days ago Bob
walked off a cliff, and last week Bill was bitten by a bear trying to get some
honey. What to do? It doesn't seem safe out there.
Better have a look at the cave drawings and carvings made by Roger. He was out
yesterday and brought back plenty of fresh kill—something he seems to be doing
a lot lately. Maybe his petroglyphs can shed some
light on things.
It Works in Marketing, Too
Do best practices give you an advantage in devising marketing strategies and
executing tactics? Yes, they do. Not only will the empirical knowledge
represented in best practices protect you from the mistakes made by others, but
using them as a baseline will also allow you to come up with sharper strategies
and better results.
Few people would argue that a pilot should give up his preflight procedure in
favor of a creative session, but there are those who argue that marketing
professionals should always start from scratch and make their own mistakes,
even if the exact same mistakes have been made a thousand times before. Why?
Is there something about soft-skill disciplines that requires the practitioner
to make his own mistakes? Does a marketing strategy become more effective if
devised by novices? Not likely.
In fact, recent research in the cognitive sciences demonstrates the value of
best practices in soft-skill disciplines. One study at
The procedure? Negotiating contingencies rather than
applying the more common strategy of "cutting the baby in half." The
contingency strategy represents a best practices procedure that allows for more
creative solutions at the time of need—during the negotiations—which in turn
yields higher monetary outcomes. This strategy also represents a best practices
procedure in which the practitioner is given creative freedom so that she can
claim ownership of the results.
To argue that best practices should be dumped in favor of reinventing the wheel
(as some do) is simply not to understand the value of best practices and how to
use them to your advantage. Sometimes, best practices are simply a way of
maximizing performance. Other times, they are about building on the knowledge
of others without wasting time getting bitten by a bear.
Finding and Defining Best Practices
· Research best practices
internally. Start by interviewing the person directly responsible for the
performance of the practice you are researching (e.g., sales manager, team lead).
Sometimes, just sitting down with this person will help clarify what works and
what doesn't. Do not assume that upper management has a better grasp on things
than the person who has consistent experience with that practice. Also, look
for recent and older performance reports and stats, and interview the best
performing employees whenever possible.
· Use external sources. If you do not find
enough information internally, or if you are not confident that what you did
find amounts to best practices, look outside your company. You can either do
your own research or purchase a set of best practices off the rack from
companies specializing in this field. Remember that best practices are
essentially the most efficient (least amount of effort) and effective (best
results) way of accomplishing a task. You are looking for empirical knowledge
(from trial and error) on how to best perform a task.
· Defining best practices. When looking for best
practices, always keep in mind the difference between preferences and best
practices. Most people believe that their own preferences represent best
practices, but they rarely do. Best practices should be similar to a pilot's
preflight procedure. You are looking for repeatable procedures that have proven
themselves over time and for more than one person.
Taking Advantage of Best Practices
How do you ensure that everyone uses best practices to
their advantage? Other than confusing the most comfortable way of doing
things with the most efficient and effective way, there are
typically three reasons why people do not take advantage of best practices.
· Lack of advantageous
retrieval from memory at the time of need. One simple but common impediment is
forgetting to do the right thing at the right time. It's what happened to the
less successful negotiators in the
· Not knowing what
constitutes best practices for a specific task at any given time. Recent research from
the University of Michigan Business School, Duke University and the University
of Chicago reports that people at all skill levels, including both top
achievers and poor performers, are poor judges of their own comparative
talents. Good checklists combined with ready online access to relevant support
material solves this problem as long as you can ensure that the tools are used.
· Not picking up the right
knowledge when needed. Most disciplines, including marketing, are in a state of
information overload. It is therefore not enough to require an employee to
Google a topic to pick up the right information. You need to have an
established procedure for editing and vetting new information for relevance,
then making sure it is accessible online for use when needed.
* * *
When marketing strategies fail, it's not because they aren't innovative enough.
They fail because someone didn't think it was necessary to pay attention to
fundamentals.
The choice, therefore, is yours: Throw best practices out the window and end up
getting bitten by that bear, or focus your attention on how to combine Roger's
good hunting techniques with your own knack for picking berries, and end up
with both a main course and a delicious dessert for all.