Are you doing it like everyone else? Why?
Does it pay to be like or unlike others in your field?
Some reasons to be like others:
- If there are genuine best practices in your field — like the body of technical knowledge built up around the job of flying a commercial airliner — it serves you well to follow those practices. In other words, you can harness the benefits of “standard work.”
- It might make your work easier to understand — for customers, for employees, for yourself.
- You can mimic the success of the best in your field, e.g. in the way that JetBlue has copied some of the best practices of Southwest and Alaska Airlines.
Some reasons to be unlike others:
- Product or market differentiation. If you do what everybody else does, you run the risk of getting everybody else’s results — which will, by definition, be average when regarded across the board.
- Anecdotal evidence tells us that many of the great performers behave quite differently from their peers, whether we’re talking about Albert Einstein or Google or J. S. Bach.
- Doing things differently often allows you to look at the world differently, which in turn allows your mind to make breakthroughs unavailable to those following the status quo.
In the real world, this isn’t such a bipolar question: hybridities abound. Toyota, for example, pursues rigorous standard-work manufacturing processes that are (now) widely dispersed around the world. But their devotion to making small, incremental, boring improvement to internal processes sets them apart from other car makers.
My Hoover’s colleague Russ Somers, whose education includes both touchy-feely social sciences (his description) and math-nerd quantification, suggests that this whole topic could make for a fascinating data-driven research project. Someone brilliant could measure companies on various metrics — market share versus margin, communication practices, average length of work-week, and so on — and figure out how much variation, and what kinds of variation, are beneficial.
Meanwhile, though, let me poll the audience here: In what ways should you be out of step with your peers? And in what ways should you be looking for “best practices” in your line of work — or in your personal working day?
(Photo by B~.)
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Here’s my take on it:
Use best practices in areas where you need to coordinate repetitive activities with others. The parallel in communication is: use a common vocabulary whenever possible to help with understanding and with information retrieval.
Incorporate new behaviors and approaches after you master existing approaches and you know they won’t get you what you need. Picasso became adept at realism before he developed his own style.
In communication, use neologisms when you’re really conveying something new that you want to attach to a word.
Seems like JetBlue is a good example of both best-practice imitation and new-practice innovation. They’ve copied elements of operational efficiency from low-cost pioneers. They’ve innovated by adding touches of luxury (legroom, better-than-cattle-car treatment in coach).
Where they can’t outdo the competition, they copy the best so they’re at least at parity. If you build on that base by choosing a couple key areas of differentiation that your customers care about, you end up with an oxymoronic business model. “Just like our competitors – only better.”
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