Best practices can damage your business

Simply using best practices does not guarantee results. Used without the right focus they can even damage your business.

If you do not have clear business-driven aims...

If you use best practices – without clear business-driven aims - a lot of resources will be consumed in the approach with little chance of producing a return on that investment. You will have wasted scarce resources, missed opportunities, adversely affected your profits and even morale.

Even if you have clear business-driven aims…

If you are hoping for a silver-bullet...

If you use best practices – hoping for a “silver-bullet” that will provide all the answers and produce guaranteed results, think again, or you are likely to be seriously disappointed. You may have set the right direction, but you have set the wrong expectations and this will limit what you achieve.

Over-simplifying matters – best practices provide questions, not answers. The results you achieve depend critically on the ability of your people to understand your aims and to implement efficient and effective ways to achieve those results. Your people provide the answers. Your people are critical. Give them the right tools for the job, don't use an approach to improvement that makes it heavy going›.