Management concepts: Adopting Best practice

In my earlier blog on best practice (http://mentorsofmanagement.blogspot.com/2011/01/mirror-technique-to-adopt-best.html ), I had mentioned about mirror technique.

This blog is a continuation of that blog wherein I am explaining simple, smart and efficient way of adopting best practices.

What is best practice?

Best practice is the way of achieving a target with maximum possible effectiveness and efficiency with the minimum possible effort. One of the fundamental mistakes that we do is that, we feel best practices can be adopted from only with in the confined limits of your organization or peer organizations. This puts a major limitation.

Where to adopt best practice from?

The one and only rule that I would like to put forward for adopting best practices is that ‘ Best practices should be adopted from just about any source’.

Be it be from your manager, your peers, your subordinates, peer organization, you parents, relatives, friends, other organizations providing unrelated services, even from strangers, situations and so on.

The beauty of doing it this way is that, you are not wasting your time experimenting best way of doing things. Other people has already put in their time to research, experiment, implement and prove a best practice there by giving you an opportunity of ‘not to reinvent the wheel’.

Let me make it as simple as possible for you to understand. For example, if you are a car manufacturer, how do you adopt best practice?

Can you imagine you making a car with

· Designed in Italy

· Technology from Japan

· Engineering excellence from Germany

· Labour from Korea

· Manufactured and marketed in America

· Tested in India

· And available at Chinese rate?

This exactly is your expected outlook towards adopting best practice. Embrace the best of all from around the globe and you will be one of the smartest person in the world.

How to adopt best practice?

Having known where to adopt best practice from, now the question is How to adopt best practice. It’s simple but requires pro-active effort from your end.

There are two part to adopting a best practice

1. Adopting the best practice

2. Improvising on the best practice

The trick is, once you understand where a specific best practice to be adopted from, you go one level deeper to understand how they do it. Once you know the tricks of the trade, it’s a matter of adopting and implementing the same.

Once implemented the story doesn’t end there, it leads to the next level – The very act of owning it. The only way you can own it is by customizing and improvising the best practise which you adopted to suit your requirements.

Example

Part 1 - Adopting the best practice - Street beggar saving money

Can you ever imagine you have a best practice to adopt from a street beggar? Let me take that as an example here. The street beggars have the unique ability to save money! – Something which is hard to even dream for most of us J.

How do they do it? The trick is that they live a simple life which requires barely any money other than their food. Their spending is very less proportionate to what they earn. Sometimes, you will be astonished to know that they save much more than most of us by the end of the month!

Isn’t it a wonderful best practice to adopt?

Part 2 – Improvising the best practice - Investing saved money

Now let’s take it one step forward and see how we can improvise on the above best practice adopted

Much to do with their luck, the sad part is that the street beggars do not have enough education and general knowledge that they never think of investing the money. They only know how to save. So all their hard earned money will just die with them without any investment for their kids and their kids end up leading similar life.

So, what is the take away from it? Simple! Improvise on it by investing the saved money. That way you start owning it and be smarter. Which means, your role doesn’t end where you have just adopted the above best practice. You need to slowly own it. Unless you start adding your ideas in to the best practice adopted, it is just another off the shelf idea which got adopted as it is without even checking its fitness in to your specific context.

You can invest in your own education, children’s education, owning a land/house, new business etc. You can find many fine examples where people with their patience and investments have made it big.

Having given a generic example above, now I want to come to our core Topic. How to do this in a professional environment.

As a professional, you all can start identifying the areas where you want to sharpen your skill. I am listing some examples here below as TIPs and the source from where you can adopt the best practice.

The following are some of the example I use for my own adoption

· Customer satisfaction and impeccable delivery – Implement exactly what you expect from a Multi-cuisine restaurant after ordering your lunch

· Constant evaluation and alertness – Implement exactly what you expect from the Security guard of your apartment

· Agility and Dynamism – Implement exactly what a formulae 1 racer expects from the boys at Pitstop

· Perfectness – Implement exactly what your expect from your Vehicle mechanic while doing the service of your vehicle

· Timeliness – Implement exactly what you expect from your grocery shop/pizza after ordered for a home delivery

· Quality – Learn from Japanese people on how to stick to the quality coveted by all

· Sharpness – Implement exactly what you expect from your advocate would take up your issue and help you resolve it

These are only few, I recommend you sit and invest time to come up with your own best practice sources. Remember, what works for you each one of you need not work for all others. The sources of best practices will change based on people’s observation capacity, ideologies, their understanding of the things around them.

So, explore your capacity and start adopting best practices. All the best!