Harvest your Best Practices. Innovate them, or die.
The Secret: Continuously Innovate Best Practices to Next Practices
Financial Management
We all know that we are organized in silos. These silos have names…Purchase, Operations, Accounts, Human Resource Development, and so on.
We have owners for these silos, who are accountable for the performance of their respective silo. Director (Operations), Director (Human Resource Development), and so on.
Career paths are carved within a silo.
Financial goals are set, silo by silo.
These silos are managed with three processes…Financial Planning, Financial Control, Financial Improvement. They service the shareholders and banks!
Quality Management
Who defines Quality? Who is the final inspector? Who pays your salary?
Customer. Customer. Customer.
Where is the customer in the silo model? Outside the organization.
This customer receives output of work that flows horizontally across silos. We call this horizontal work a process.
Owing to the fortress of silos, work faces many battle grounds on its journey to the customer.
There are no owners for processes. So there is no one accountable for the performance of individual processes. This results in processes flowing across the length and breadth of an organizations, as benchmarks for inefficiency and ineffectiveness.
In some organizations, processes are manged with Quality Planning, Quality Control, Quality Improvement. These processes perform Faster / Better / Cheaper than their defined competition.
We need both. Financial Management and Quality Management.
Startups
Unknowingly, startups tend to singularly focus on customers and processes. They are driven by the mantra: Faster / Better /Cheaper / Different.
These startup entrepreneurs are impatient. They benchmark best practices of successful organizations, in a similar space, and innovate the same to next practices for their own organizations.
All this must be done at lightening speed. Their aim is to be the first in the market place. These young entrepreneurs know that there is no consolation prize for being second.
The company life cycles for startups is dependent on singular product life cycles. They dream of a Break Even Point at zero output!
Their Financial Management inputs come from investors; and Quality Management inputs from their sixth sense about the customer.
The risks are extremely high.
Best Practices
Regardless of your business vintage, are your managerial practices being benchmarked? Yes. Good. You are best-in-class.
Do you know your best practices? No. You should harvest your best practices with assessment tools, such as, the BestPrax Barometer or IMC Ramkrishna Bajaj National Quality Award Model. There are several more.
Best practices have a life. They are easily replicated by competitors. The ‘Different’ is easily converted to a Commodity.
Suggestion:
- Harvest your best practices
- Continuously innovate these best practices to next practices..
Track the record of Amazon, and Uber.
Random Thoughts
- Should startups benchmark the practices of craftsmen who built the Taj Mahal?
- The craftsman who built the pyramids in Egypt understood customer needs.
- Survival of the family, for a craftsman, depended on effectiveness with respect to customers and efficiency with respect to the processes.
- The reputation of a craftsman family had to survive several generations.
I am surprised by your statement – “Harvest your best practices” though I know what you said is true. Why is that organisations don’t value their best practices? Shouldn’t they be consistently improving on it to retain their competitive edge? Or are there other ways of doing so? Am I missing something here? Like a good sportsman constantly working on improving upon strengths and reducing weaknesses, shouldn’t companies be doing the same? Would love to know the answer.
Organizations tend to work in a fire fighting mode. Put the fire out! Treat the symptom of the problem.
That is good for maintaining the standard. It also makes us look very busy. In fact, rewards are given to fire fighters.
There is no time to appreciate one’s own Best Practices. In fact, one tends to believe all industry must be doing the same. Watch out:. Your competitors know your Best Practices. They catch up.
You do the same with your competitors. Fire fight to catch up!
Hence the recommendation to proactively harvest your Best Practices. Transform them to Next Practices before competitors catch up and commoditize your Best Practices.
Its a cruel world Ashok.
So very true, we must imbibe and harvest best practices- goes without saying.
The practices have to deliver customer needs. While harvesting, we need to nurture the processes and practices aimed at outcomes required by customers.
Narayana Hrudalalaya benchmark McDonalds but what and how is critical.
Harvesting your Best Practices is key.
These practices are seeded in processes.
Processes deliver outputs to External / Internal Customers.