Consumer Behavior
The perils of best practice: Should you emulate Apple?
Outliers are exactly that. Duplicating their performance is harder than we might wish.
SEPTEMBER 2012 • Marla M. Capozzi, Ari Kellen, and Sven Smit
Source: Strategy Practice http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_perils_of_best_practice_Should_you_emulate_Apple_3013 It’s no mystery why companies emulate their most successful peers. Tried-and-true approaches often seem preferable to starting from scratch, whether for developing new products or running efficient supply chains. The quest for such methods went global during the 1980s and 1990s as European and US companies sought to retool their operations by transplanting Japanese factory practices, such as kanban and just-in-time production. Management consultants—ourselves included—naturally facilitate the process by extolling successful companies as models from which others can learn proven practices that reduce risks.
However, perils abound when truly exceptional companies morph into ever more ubiquitous examples. Observers and management theorists alike, blinded by star power, eventually assume that everything these companies do should be regarded as best practice—often without examining the context in which they derive their success or without parsing the true nature of their accomplishments. Managers tempted to distill universal insights from what are in fact exceptional companies put their own businesses at risk for strategic or operational missteps.
Others before us—notably Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford, Adrian Wooldridge at theEconomist, and Phil Rosenzweig at IMD—have issued warnings about best-practice traps and management-theory fads.1 Yet the desire to emulate is often stronger than mere rationality, even in the face of repeated evidence that most companies won’t achieve the anticipated outcomes and that some will suffer a hard fall. Research by our colleagues, for instance, has shown that lockstep benchmarking may lead to
Outliers are exactly that. Duplicating their performance is harder than we might wish.
SEPTEMBER 2012 • Marla M. Capozzi, Ari Kellen, and Sven Smit
Source: Strategy Practice http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_perils_of_best_practice_Should_you_emulate_Apple_3013 It’s no mystery why companies emulate their most successful peers. Tried-and-true approaches often seem preferable to starting from scratch, whether for developing new products or running efficient supply chains. The quest for such methods went global during the 1980s and 1990s as European and US companies sought to retool their operations by transplanting Japanese factory practices, such as kanban and just-in-time production. Management consultants—ourselves included—naturally facilitate the process by extolling successful companies as models from which others can learn proven practices that reduce risks.
However, perils abound when truly exceptional companies morph into ever more ubiquitous examples. Observers and management theorists alike, blinded by star power, eventually assume that everything these companies do should be regarded as best practice—often without examining the context in which they derive their success or without parsing the true nature of their accomplishments. Managers tempted to distill universal insights from what are in fact exceptional companies put their own businesses at risk for strategic or operational missteps.
Others before us—notably Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford, Adrian Wooldridge at theEconomist, and Phil Rosenzweig at IMD—have issued warnings about best-practice traps and management-theory fads.1 Yet the desire to emulate is often stronger than mere rationality, even in the face of repeated evidence that most companies won’t achieve the anticipated outcomes and that some will suffer a hard fall. Research by our colleagues, for instance, has shown that lockstep benchmarking may lead to