Boldy Go Where No Has Before: Prepare to Do 20 Times More by Looking Five Years Ahead
To hit a moving target, you have to aim to where the target
will be . . . not where the target is now. To accomplish
20 times more, you'll need to outdo others in the future.
Seeing where they will be in five years can give you a firm
foundation for seeing how to go beyond that expected
performance that will satisfy everyone else.
The steps for creating a 2,000 percent solution
(accomplishing 20 times more with the same time, effort,
and resources) are listed here:
1. Understand the importance of measuring performance.
2. Decide what to measure.
3. Identify the future best practice and measure it.
4. Implement beyond the future best practice.
5. Identify the ideal best practice.
6. Pursue the ideal best practice.
7. Select the right people and provide the right motivation.
8. Repeat the first seven steps.
This essay looks at step three. Your challenge is to
identify what the best-in-the-world performance for a
critical activity or process will probably look like (in or
out of your industry) for the next several years. I call
that performance the "future best practice."
Chances are that your organization does not yet know how to
find and select the improved practice elements that, when
combined for the first time, will drive you well ahead of
the competition. Much of what is written about so-called
benchmarking (of which you will read more soon) will not be
of much use to you for this challenge. This essay gives you
shortcuts to identify future best practices based on our
many years of experience in this activity. Never
assume you know the right answer before you seek to develop
practices that exceed the best others will probably do.
Unfortunately, many intelligent and experienced people do
just that. They smugly pursue their own ideas without
looking further. They forget that every industry is filled
with bright, energetic people.
For every critical task within your organization, there
will almost always be someone on the outside who does it
better. In fact, the odds favor the future best practice
lying outside of your industry.
To do better than the best, you have to know what the best
is and where that best performance will be in the future.
Otherwise, you'll probably set an objective that's too low,
and deny yourself what you could learn by studying the best.
Not Just Copycatting, But Innovating
Best-practice thinking evolved to the form we are
discussing out of simple benchmarking. A benchmark is a
standard of excellence against which performance is
measured. For a product, seeking a benchmark might mean
buying a competing product and letting engineers tear it
apart to see how you could both copy and improve what
exists now. Almost everyone does this. Forget such
copycat-based work. Tomorrow's best practice is being
developed by someone other than the company you are
copycatting. Through copycatting, you'll be aiming at the
wrong target. The same effort based on learning from other
industries will yield better results than copycatting
because the knowledge base is greater and it's usually more
powerful than anything you can develop on your own.
You also need to innovate further because making serious
inroads in a marketplace requires big advantages over
competitors that customers crave.
No Assuming Allowed
Creating assumptions about the future best practice based
on anything other than detailed investigations is simply a
version of the not-invented-here stall. Do your homework!
The Quest for the Best
Here are useful steps to begin your search:
1. Look internally to find out who does it better than
anyone else in your organization.
2. Identify why some operations perform better than others.
3. Ask around inside your organization to start learning
who does something similar even better in other
industries.
4. Check out public sources of information on these
subjects.
5. Contact those who may have something to offer.
6. Consider buying access to best-practice databases like
those maintained by accounting firms and The American
Productivity and Quality Center.
7. Interview experts and academics who may have applicable
knowledge.
8. Ask those you contact for other leads.
9. Look globally.
Ever Onward
Keep going. Determining the future best practice is a
continuing task. Whether or not you notice it, the future
performance bar is always being raised. Be circumspect
about this work, however, lest you awaken a sleeping rival
prematurely.
When you do your work on future best practice well, you
will be able to identify:
• Several current best practices from outside your industry
that your competitors are not using
• The current best practices in your industry being applied
by competitors
• Where both sets of current best practices will probably
evolve as processes and to what performance levels over the
next five years
• A way to assemble many of the current and future best
practices in a new way to create performance that far
exceeds the likely effectiveness of any existing
organization over the next five years
Most benchmarking programs ignore all these lessons. That
shortsightedness will help you create large advantages that
lead to exponential success.
King of the Hill
It is natural to assume that large, profitable industry
leaders like GE, Microsoft, Intel, and Dell use only the
current best practices. But that happy circumstance is
usually not the case. The older the company and the bigger
it is, the fewer future best practices it is likely to
develop and sustain. Oddly enough, marginal companies tend
to be better sources for future-best-practice information.
Why? Low-performing companies face more cash-flow pressures
and have little choice but to focus on efficiency in all of
their endeavors. These firms are also less likely to stand
pat with existing procedures. They know that performance
must improve or they won't be around long.
Don't Believe You Know the Answer: Ask Why
Many people have misinterpreted what they see. If you ask
why things are done the way they are, you'll avoid that
mistake. Henry Ford told buyers of his Model T automobile
that they could have any color as long as it was black.
Many people assume that Ford was either color-blind or had
gotten a good price for black paint. In fact, black was the
only color you could use for a consistent color in those
days. If other colors had looked good on the Model T, Ford
would have offered them.
Likewise, visitors to Japanese factories usually marvel at
how compact they are. Knowing that land is expensive in
Japan, visitors assume they know the answer. And they are
partly right, but even when land is cheap such as in a corn
field in Iowa, Japanese factories are compact. Why?
Japanese executives know that compactness improves
communications among workers. The closer people work on a
product, the better the quality. That's one reason why
team-built products are usually better made than
assembly-line offerings.
STALLBUSTERS
Look in All the Obvious Places for Future-Best-Practice
Information
• What online resources, periodicals, books, seminars,
databases, services, and organizations are available to
help you?
• Who are the favorite sources for authors, writers, and
editors?
• What organizations have been described as being excellent
in these areas?
• Who do experts say is the best they've ever seen?
• Who do the best in the field pay attention to?
Look in All the Not-So-Obvious Places for Future Best
Practice Information
• Which organizations in the world could have processes
like yours?
• Who do the experts in these organizations think does
these processes the best now and will do the processes best
in the future?
• Which experts in top-performing, noncompeting
organizations will let you visit to observe, measure,
and discuss their processes?
Be Prepared to Do Your Own Measuring
• What can be seen and learned during a personal visit?
• Can you gain more access to key people during a visit?
• Who should measure?
• What should they measure?
Estimate How Quickly the Future Best Practice Will Change
in the Future
• What information do you need to make such an estimate?
• What has been the rate of improvement?
• How is that rate of improvement likely to change?
• How can experts help you improve your estimate?
Copyright 2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved
----------------------------------------------------
Donald Mitchell is chairman of Mitchell and Company, a
strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He is
coauthor of six books including The 2,000 Percent Squared
Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, and The 2,000 Percent
Solution Workbook. You can find free tips for accomplishing
20 times more by registering at:
=========> http://www.2000percentsolution.com .
