Best business practice does no longer equal best business strategy.It is uniqueness and creativity that differ those who stay ahead of the pack and those who drag behind.Professor Stephen Cummings from the Victoria Management School, who studied trends in
Best business practice does no longer equal best business strategy.
It is uniqueness and creativity that differ those who stay ahead of the pack and those who drag behind.
Professor Stephen Cummings from the Victoria Management School, who studied trends in strategic management during the past four decades with co-researcher Associate Professor Urs Daellenbach, told the National Business Review simply copying best practice ultimately erodes strategic advantage.
Leading companies normally become the pioneers in best business practices, and the rest tend to “copy”, settling for a “safe” option.
The so-called best business practices live in five-year cycles, after which the leaders once again adopt a new business model and the rest follow.
Professor Cummings, whose paper – A Guide to the Future of Strategy – received an Emerald Citation of Excellence award Montreal in August, said unless your business is an “early mover” it is likely it will always drag behind the winners continuously adopting outdated but already tested business practices.
“Once a large number of organisations use a particular model, leading organisations go against the grain and do something different to stay ahead of the pack.
To succeed companies should move away from copying best practice towards seeing their organisation as a particular and unique collection of capabilities, he said.
“The effective strategist may increasingly become more of a politician who leads from the middle rather than the top.
“This means acting as a facilitator and connector, involving others to tap into and develop an organisation’s unique range of resources and relationships.”
Professor Cummings said it is human nature, particularly for executives who are responsible for outcomes, to go for a safe option, which promises success and eliminates failure.
“But it’s a trade off; [to win] you have to take the risk; to lead, you can’t follow, he said.
“It has become so easy for companies [to copy], that they miss out on using their most valuable recourse, which is their uniqueness.
The scholars’ paper has made Emerald Publishers’ international top 50 list out of 15,000 articles published in top journals in the fields of management, economics, marketing, information systems, accounting and finance.
