The Best Practice

“Industry best practice.”

Translation: someone at another company did this and we’re going to copy it without understanding why it worked for them. Best practice is the corporate equivalent of wearing someone else’s prescription glasses because they said they could see better.

The best practice is never questioned. It arrived with a case study and a consultant and a deck from Bain or McKinsey. Questioning it means questioning the money spent to acquire it. Nobody questions money already spent. That’s a sunk cost and sunk costs are sacred.

So the best practice that worked at a different company with different people in a different market gets installed here, and when it doesn’t work, the blame falls on “execution,” never on the practice itself.