Dmitry Linkov

Types of best practices

March 12th, 2007. Published under General. No Comments.

Here Tom Peters writes:

I love best practices.
I hate best practices.
I love them when they are available to learn from.
I hate them when they demand mimicry.

I want to proceed with best practices idea a bit more. From Tom’s citation there are two types of best practices:
1. Best practices can be something that has to be done by everybody – so they become like a "standard of quality". Like Wi-Fi in coffee shops. It’s simply has to be done in every coffee shops, and this is not the thing that distinguish you from you competitors. This is a standard.
2. Also best practices can be something, that makes certain company distinctive, something "purple". And if you will do the same for your company – it will be a sort of mimicry. This won’t work, because you are not the first one to use it and it looses the remarkability.