“Have you implemented this somewhere else already?”
I hear this question a lot. As my friend Mark McDowell of Accenture once told me, “Most people want to be first to be second. Few want to be first.” It’s no wonder that most companies find themselves in a constant state of “catch up”.
In the April, 2010 Harvard Business Review, C.K. Prahalad makes a similar point in his excellent article, Best Practices Get You Only So Far. With regard to the adoption of best practices, Prahalad says:
Such benchmarking has a role to play in business, but I’m not exactly a big fan of the process. It may allow enterprises to catch up with competitors, but it won’t turn them into market leaders.
So why do so few many leaders want to be first to be second? I think it is due to three issues. Each one represents a major issue of leadership.
Taking risks
Clearly doing something proven is safer than doing something new. Even if it doesn’t work out, who can blame you? The data and experience were on your side. But leadership isn’t about minimizing risk, it’s about taking calculated risks to get ahead. In today’s environment, maintaining the status quo, while safe in the short term, is actually the biggest risk you can take. Why implement a new practice that only brings you up to par with your competition? How are you going to win that way? As Prahalad says “Organizations become winners by spotting big opportunities and inventing next practices…”
Understanding the business
“Business Acumen” is a hot topic for training in many organizations. It seems that too many leaders reached their positions without ever having to understand how their business worked. Now they are paying the price. Coming up with the next big idea is hard when you don’t understand the current and future dynamics of your business. As a result, it is easier to adopt someone else’s idea and manage its implementation. Managing an implementation project doesn’t require knowledge of the business, leadership does.
Executing without thinking
The final barrier is the false belief that things are moving too fast to allow time for thought. It’s easier to pull a best practice “off the shelf” than to take time to dive into the problems of your organization. However, as Jeffery Pfeffer and Robert Sutton routinely point out in their book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense, pulling ideas off the shelf doesn’t always work. Unless your organization’s strategy, customer-base, workforce, and operating model are the same as those of the company that has the best practice, you probably aren’t going to see the same result. Pfeffer and Sutton’s book is filled with examples of best practices that worked incredibly well for one company but never really delivered anywhere else. Pace has always been important for a business. However, taking time to understand the dynamics of your organization, customers, industry, and economy will ultimately drive better and faster success.
Implementing best practices is easy. You don’t need to be a leader to copy what others do. Leadership is about having the vision and understanding to see what’s next and the strength and determination to bring it to fruition.
Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.
