If you’re following ‘best practices,’ you’ve already lost. You’re just paying for the privilege of being average. It sounds harsh, but I’ve spent the better part of a decade watching smart people at decent companies trade their intuition for a PDF written by a consultant who has never actually run a business. It’s a slow, beige death.
I’ve worked in ‘general’ roles long enough to see the pattern. A company gets a little bit of success, they get scared of losing it, and suddenly everyone is talking about ‘industry standards’ and ‘benchmarking.’ What they’re actually saying is: We’re too terrified to be different, so let’s just do what Google does. But you aren’t Google. And honestly, Google isn’t even the Google of ten years ago anymore.
The time I tried to be ‘Agile’ and nearly burned the place down
It was 2017. I was working for a mid-sized logistics firm in Chicago—think dusty warehouses and people who still used fax machines. We decided we needed to ‘modernize.’ Naturally, that meant adopting Agile. We hired a guy with a certification and bought $14,000 worth of Jira licenses. We spent three months training everyone on ‘sprints’ and ‘scrum ceremonies.’ We followed every single best practice in the book. No deviations. No exceptions.
The result? Total disaster. Our output dropped by 22% in the first quarter. The warehouse guys, who used to just shout across the floor to get things done, were now stuck in ‘stand-ups’ talking about their ‘blockers.’ It was absurd. I remember sitting in a windowless conference room, watching a grown man move a digital sticky note on a screen while three trucks were idling outside because the ‘process’ hadn’t cleared the manifest yet. I felt like a complete fraud for recommending it. We weren’t being agile; we were just being bureaucratic with better software.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. We were trying to solve a human problem with a template. Best practices are like a hotel buffet—safe, edible, and completely forgettable. You know exactly what you’re going to get, and that’s exactly why nobody ever writes home about it.
Why benchmarking is just a fancy word for copying
Every time a VP asks for a ‘competitive benchmark,’ a little piece of my soul withers. If you are looking at what your three biggest competitors are doing so you can do the same thing, you aren’t strategizing. You’re just joining the back of the line. This is where I know people will disagree, but I think most ‘Strategy’ departments are actually just ‘Copying’ departments with better slide decks. They find the common denominator and call it a win.
True competitive advantage is found in the things your competitors are too scared or too ‘professional’ to do.
If everyone in your industry uses a specific CRM, and you use it too, you have zero advantage. If everyone uses the same ‘proven’ sales script, you’re just another noise in the customer’s ear. I’ve seen companies obsess over ‘best practices’ for their website UI until every site in the category looks identical. Same hero image. Same three-column feature list. Same blue ‘Get Started’ button. It’s cowardice, plain and simple.
I used to think Standard Operating Procedures were the holy grail. I was completely wrong. They’re just scripts for robots. And if you’re running a business of robots, don’t be surprised when a real robot—one made of code—eventually replaces you for half the price.
The 19% experiment
Last year, I got fed up with our ‘best practice’ meeting culture. You know the one: every meeting must have an agenda, must be 30 minutes, must have notes. It sounds great on paper. In reality, it just means people spend more time preparing for meetings than doing work. I decided to run a test with my small team of six. I didn’t ask HR. I definitely didn’t ask my boss.
For seven weeks, we followed the ‘best practices’ perfectly. Then, for the next seven weeks, we did the ‘Leave Everyone Alone’ method. No recurring meetings. No agendas. If you needed someone, you walked to their desk or sent a 10-second video clip. I tracked our output—actual finished tasks, not ‘busy work’—and the results were stupidly clear. During the ‘Leave Everyone Alone’ weeks, we saw a 19% increase in completed tickets. Nineteen percent! That’s nearly a full day of productivity recovered every week just by ignoring the ‘experts.’
Anyway, I should probably mention that I have a weird obsession with mechanical keyboards. I own five of them. There’s something about the tactile click of a Cherry MX Blue switch that makes me feel like I’m actually building something, even if I’m just typing a boring email. It’s a total waste of money, but it makes the grind bearable. But I digress.
The part where I get a bit mean
I’m going to say something that would get me fired from a corporate consulting gig: I think most VPs of Strategy are professional procrastinators. They use ‘best practices’ to hide the fact that they don’t have a single original thought about how to grow the business. It’s a safety blanket. If the ‘best practice’ fails, they can say, ‘Well, that’s what McKinsey suggested.’ If they try something weird and it fails, it’s their head on the block. So they choose the safe, slow death every time.
And don’t even get me started on Salesforce. I actively tell my friends to avoid it if they’re at a company under 500 people. It’s a bloated, over-engineered mess that exists primarily to justify the jobs of the people who ‘administer’ it. I’ve bought the same $40 Moleskine notebook for every job I’ve had since 2012. I don’t care if Notion or Salesforce is ‘better’ for data retention. If it’s not on paper, it’s not real to me. I have zero loyalty to ‘stack optimization’ if it gets in the way of me actually thinking.
Best practices are training wheels that nobody ever takes off. They’re great when you’re five years old and don’t know how to balance. But if you’re still using them in the Tour de France, you’re going to look like an idiot and you’re definitely not going to win.
I don’t have a neat five-step plan to fix this. I’m still trying to figure out how to stop my own team from sliding back into ‘industry standard’ thinking every time a new project gets hard. It’s a constant battle against the urge to be safe.
Maybe the only real advice is this: The next time someone suggests a ‘best practice,’ ask them who else is doing it. If the answer is ‘everyone,’ that is your signal to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.
Stop asking permission.