Best Practices Usually Aren't

By definition, when you follow best practices, you’re following a well-informed crowd of other operators. You’re standing on the shoulders of others’ experiences and avoiding having to reinvent the wheel and learn everything about how to do a thing from scratch. But you’re still following the crowd. As a rule, best practices aren’t written to help you deliver exceptional experiences. It’s not a strategy designed for your business and tailored to your particular needs and objectives. Best practices are a reference guide based on the aggregate experience of lots of different businesses; suggestions that may have tended to work to varying degrees in the past. Business loses out when we start using ‘best practices’ to stamp out any deviation from an orthodox approach. Don’t let ‘best practices’ take over your brand…. The bottom line: think transactional proficiency vs experiential impact. Context matters.