Comments on: Can “best practices” and “innovation” co-exist in successful companies?

By: Emily

Emily — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:19:31 +0000

Interesting question Julia. My perspectives emanates partially from some research I was involved in regarding self-managed work teams. As part of that effort, I established a “learning network” of organizations that were in various stages of implementing the self-managed work team concept.

My take-away from that long ago experience was people and companies were asking the wrong quetions. They were asking “what are you doing, what works?” What they should have been asking is “how did you go about learning what you needed to know to adapt the work team concept to your situation”. In other words, comanies were focused on copying what others that were successful were doing.

I came to the conclusion that the best way for a company to “get ahead” of the competition was to have the competition exactly adopt what the sucessful company was doing, without going through all the steps that made what the sucessful company was doing sucessful.

However, I do believe that studying best practices to ascertain the output that other companies are getting and Innovation are not at odds and actually complementary. To find out industry leaders are 50%-100% better than you on some key indicator is useful information. How to close the gap and get ahead is a problem to be addressed through innovation. If you just do what the other company is doing (and your are not likely to be able to reproduce it sucessfully unless you are just like the benchmarked company, the very best you can hope for is to draw even, and that is highly unlikely given their learning advantage and postion on the learning curve.

By: Dale Hudson

Dale Hudson — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:42:50 +0000

Best practices is not just about processes, its also about people. Mr. Ligget and Dr. Gottlieb touched on it when they mentioned culture. For there to be best practices and Innovation the people of the organization need some sense of safety that what ever is expressed with not be held against them, they will not be embarrased, critized or punished. Innovation requres the same organizational temperment. Often innovation comes from the outliers, not a continuation of the same thinking. Best practices should encourage, and I hate this term, “out of the box thinking”. One comment mentioned learning. Organizational learning comes from discovery, asking different questions and changing the converstion. That cannot happen when individuals are fearful there comments or ideas will be laughed at or ignored. Asking questions is not enough, its asking the right questions. “What questions are we not asking that we should be?” The answers to that question require the best from people and encourages innovation in its scope. While they may be different in concept, organizational success cannot occur without the contribution of each, innovation and best practices.

By: Luke Novelli, Jr

Luke Novelli, Jr — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:31:35 +0000

By: Marvin Gottlieb, Ph.D

Marvin Gottlieb, Ph.D — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:59:27 +0000

A list of best practices provides a good indicator of areas that need examining and possible change within the organization. Wholesale adoption of best practices without considering cultural, political, technical, and resource constraints may cause more harm than good. Innovation is a mutually exclusive phenomenon often associated with the organization’s ability to predict the future by interacting in a systemic way with the environment outside the organization. Best practices are developed in retrospect, and are more aligned with the past than the future. If the organiztion fixates on best practices and succeeds, it will already be behind.

By: Robert Martin

Robert Martin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:21:25 +0000

Jay, I tihnk they already have it going on twitter

By: Jay Pizarro

Jay Pizarro — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:52:59 +0000

Julia, your thoughtful question has generated a broad discussion with far-reaching impact on business management. I would like to expand this discussion further and would like to invite comments @JayPizarro on twitter. Lets see where the public conversation leads to!

By: Holly G. Green

Holly G. Green — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:48:16 +0000

I do believe both can co-exist and they do in many environments with one caveat- I don’t believe in ‘best practices’, I believe in winning practices that work in context. In other words, the environment has a lot to do with whether something works well – the system, process, tools, culture, etc. all collude to create a context for winning practices. Almost all practices require constant updating especially in such fast moving times. You have to constantly check in and pause for a moment or two to consider whether it is time to update, change or eliminate. Innovation does not have to be a huge change. Like Toyota, which implements thousands of small improvements on an ongoing basis, innovation also happens when you refine, tweak, update to achieve something new that has value to at least one of your stakeholders. When something works especially well for us, we tend to stick with it even if everything else changes around it. This is when winning practices begin to hurt us rather than help us. Look at what is working in your organization and constantly double check to update your mental models about what might need to be refined about it.

By: Nico Viergever

Nico Viergever — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:32:16 +0000

Julia,
Great question but I got no idea. A lot of practices described as Best Practices are just Common Practices. Someone here described PMI: PMI in my book are describing the ways projects are currently managed. So describing the failing ways not ways to improve.
Some of the Best Practices I promote are (at least in my book) common sense and should, when used, improve things hugely. It is just a shame that they are hardly used. The standard reaction:
Yes, great idea! But that is not how we work here.

From that point of view I can only agree with Marianne’s last lines.

By: Marianne Weidlein

Marianne Weidlein — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:30:17 +0000

With the changing US and world economy, this time could be a prelude to more difficult times ahead. If so, how are we responding? Limiting personal and business attitudes and practices that we can drag with us in good economic times will be our downfall.

This year has begun revealing many misguided, limiting, and irresponsible attitudes and practices. These are now so in our faces that they profoundly reveal the necessity for change.

To effectively address the multi-dimensional, complex issues we as a humanity face, we clearly cannot use the same thinking and methods that assisted up to create this socio-economic and ecological conundrum. We must awaken from our complacency. We are wise to use both best practices and innovation. From best practices, we are wise to use only the tried-and-true, most supportive ones. And we must cultivate ingenuity and innovation, and choose wise action before the accelerating pace reaches “too late”.

And we don’t ever know it’s too late until it’s too late…

By: Aman K. Deep

Aman K. Deep — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:27:35 +0000

The Goal of Best Practices and Innovation is the same a quality process and end product to staisfy the customer needs.

Innovation can and surely does coexists with Best Practices. Almost all the best practices has a process of continious improvement(ITIL, PMI), what we have to look at is how does an organization alligns its Innovation Process in the continous improvement cycle of the Best Practices.

Other way round , if I talk of Apple .. Innovation Management out there is their Best Practices