When “Best Practices” Become Deadly

Spark Partners has been coaching clients for almost 30 years on how to achieve long-term success.  But despite the research, the books, the Forbes (and other) articles and interviews, people are still getting things wrong.  The failure cases of 30 years ago are forgotten (Multgraphics, Kodak, Xerox) while new cases – with identical patterns to the old – are happening right now in 2024 – Boeing, Intel, Walgreens, Red Lobster and Big Lots.

 

This podcast explores how the “best practices” for business from the 1990s and early 2000s are killing companies.  Old ideas of “focus on your core” doom your success.  Even though we think doing more, better, faster and cheaper will inevitably lead to success, the opposite is true.  The more you focus on what you do, the faster you’ll lose relevancy and find your way to big problems and failure.  The more you pay attention to earnings the more likely you’ll lose relevance and fall into a sales decline. 

Listen to how the pattern keeps repeating – and how you can break out of the pattern to be much more successful – like Campbell’s (surprised at that one I bet – go listen!)

Thinking Points:

• Do you spend most of your time keeping the business going?  Improving things for customers?
• Do you use up all (or most) of your resources (time, energy, employees, assets) on your current business?
• Do you find yourself adverse to the risk of doing new things, so delaying starting new things?
• Do you know the biggest trends that will drive revenue growth in your industry over the next decade?
• Do you spend more time fixing problems than researching trends?
• Do you have a formal resource allocation process to help you invest in the right things?