Best practices are crazy. They point to one example, they don’t have any idea why the thing was actually successful but they go, “Well, they do it this way so we’re going to do it this way.”
There’s this herd mentality and people are focusing on the wrong things and paying so much attention to what they call best practices. And I think oftentimes they’re really terrible practices. This idea that if you’re a small business, let’s say you’re starting out, you’ve got five people, six people, that you’re going to do what Apple does? No, Apple’s got, what, 20,000 people or whatever?
Basecamp CEO, Jason Fried
People who want to be successful often read books by successful people. Examples of the success of Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey or Elon Musk are all well and good. You can learn lots from these books. Of course you can.
But you can’t copy the successes of others. You can’t – for the most part – adopt their ‘best practices’ and expect the same results.
This applies to the conundrum of how we save the High Street. The demise of local manufacturing. The response to Brexit at a national and local level.
Who will have the original ideas instead of the best practices?