Nobody Ever Got Fired for Following the Best Practice
Every business likes to believe it is one of a kind. And in a sense, every one
Every business likes to believe it is one of a kind. And in a sense, every one is. Two firms can sell the same product, in the same city, to the same customer, and still end up worlds apart — one commands a premium and a waiting list, the other quietly discounts itself into irrelevance. Same industry. Same playbook. Different fate.
That difference almost never comes from the parts of the two businesses that look identical. It comes from the parts that don’t.
Which is inconvenient for the most seductive idea in all of management: the best practice.
What a “best practice” actually is
Strip away the reverence and a best practice is simply something that has been normalised. Pre-approved. Done enough times, by enough people, that it has hardened into consensus and started to carry the quiet authority of this is how it’s done. That authority feels like proof. It isn’t. “Best practice” often has very little to do with what is actually best for you — it just describes what has already been sanded down into something everyone agrees is safe.
And here is the real appeal, the part nobody says out loud: a best practice is the option nobody can get blamed for choosing.
That is the whole product. It is insurance. Follow the standard and fail, and it was the standard that failed — not you. You were being responsible. You were being professional. You did what any reasonable person in your seat would have done.
The old line was nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. The names have changed; the instinct hasn’t. Nobody gets fired for the benchmark everyone cites, the framework everyone runs, the vendor everyone uses, the org chart everyone copies. It is the safe choice. And safe, as we will see, is sometimes the most dangerous choice on the table.
Why the safe option rarely wins
Notice what you have actually bought when you buy safe.
The option nobody can fault you for is, almost by definition, the option everyone else is also allowed to take. An option everyone is taking is not an advantage. It is the cost of entry. If a practice is obvious enough to be crowned “best,” your competitors are already doing it too — which means there is no edge left in it. You have paid to stand exactly where the crowd is standing.
Michael Porter drew this line more sharply than anyone. He separated operational effectiveness — doing the same activities better than rivals do them — from strategy — deliberately choosing to do different activities, or the same ones differently. Best practices live almost entirely in the first bucket. They help you run the same race a little faster. They cannot help you choose a different race.
And Porter’s warning was blunt: when everyone in an industry chases the same operational best practices, they don’t pull ahead of each other. They converge. Their offerings blur together, customers can no longer tell them apart, and the only lever left to pull is price. This is the death spiral that produces the discounting firm from the opening — not a strategy failure so much as a strategy absence, dressed up as diligence.
Organisational theorists have a name for the underlying pull: mimetic isomorphism. Under uncertainty, firms imitate whoever looks legitimate and successful, because copying feels safer than deciding. The result is an entire industry drifting toward sameness, each firm convinced it is being prudent. Everyone benchmarking everyone else. Everyone slowly becoming the same company.
There is a subtler cost, too. The moment an organisation starts treating inherited wisdom as unquestionable wisdom, curiosity begins draining out of it. Why interrogate a decision that has already been pre-approved by the industry? Why ask an awkward question when the answer sheet is already in your hands? This is how companies calcify — not in a dramatic collapse, but in a thousand quiet moments where nobody thought to ask why. Following precedent on autopilot isn’t rigour. It is outsourcing your thinking — a comfortable way to avoid the one question that actually matters: what if the future needs a different answer than the past?
Where best practices genuinely earn their keep
Now, the honest counterpoint — because the opposite error is just as expensive.
Some best practices earn every bit of their reputation. There is no prize for reinventing payroll software, no glory in a bespoke approach to fire exits, no competitive edge waiting to be discovered in a novel way of doing double-entry bookkeeping. Financial controls, safety standards, data security, statutory compliance, basic hygiene — these are table stakes. They are the parts of your business that customers never reward you for getting right and mercilessly punish you for getting wrong. Innovating here is not brave. It is reckless, and usually a waste of the scarcest resource you have: your attention.
So the answer is never “ignore best practice.” The mistake is applying it uniformly — treating the boring, non-differentiating plumbing of your business and the parts that actually make you worth choosing as if they deserve the same off-the-shelf answer.
Here is the discriminating cut:
On the parts of your business that do not differentiate you, adopt the best practice and move on. Spend nothing you don’t have to.
On the parts that touch your differentiator — your value proposition, your customer’s actual experience, the reason someone picks you over the firm next door — copying is fatal. This is precisely where “best practice” hands you your competitors’ strategy and calls it prudence.
Get that distinction wrong and you burn creativity on payroll while running your customer experience straight off a template everyone else is also using.
How to borrow the wisdom without inheriting the trap
Best practices are best understood as compressed history. They are the fossilised record of what worked for someone else, somewhere else, under conditions that may or may not resemble yours. That makes them a genuinely useful map of terrain other people have already crossed. It also makes them dangerous the moment you mistake the map for your own territory.
So don’t discard the map. Interrogate it. Three moves:
1. Ask what problem the practice was actually solving. Every best practice is a frozen answer to a real question someone once faced. Thaw it back into that question. What was this designed to fix? For whom? Under what constraints? You cannot judge an answer until you understand what it was answering.
2. Ask whether that context still holds — for you. This is where your uniqueness finally does some work. Your circumstances, your ecosystem, your customers, your moment in the market — these are yours alone, and they decide whether an inherited answer still fits. Often the original conditions have shifted, or never applied to you in the first place. A practice that is “best” in Mumbai’s enterprise market may be actively wrong for a founder-led firm in Rajkot, and vice versa.
3. Then decide: adopt, adapt, or invent.
- Adopt where the practice is table stakes and the context still holds. Take it wholesale, save your energy.
- Adapt where the underlying principle is sound but the context has moved. Keep the logic, rebuild the execution for your reality.
- Invent where the practice touches your differentiator. This is where the game is actually won.
The one-line version: steal the principle, not the practice. Principles travel. Practices are local, and they expire.
The firms that reshaped their industries almost all did this. Southwest Airlines looked at every “best practice” in aviation — hub-and-spoke routing, seat assignments, meal service, multiple aircraft types — and deliberately refused most of them, building a point-to-point, single-aircraft, no-frills model that competitors literally could not copy without dismantling their own. IKEA broke the sacred retail practice of full service by handing the work of assembly and delivery to the customer — and customers loved the price enough to pick up a wrench. In India, Zerodha ignored the industry gospel that retail investors need relationship managers, sales armies and heavy advertising, and instead built a lean, discount, tech-first brokerage that grew largely on word of mouth. None of these were reckless. Each was a deliberate departure from a best practice that its founders had understood well enough to reject on purpose.
That last part matters. This is not a licence for contrarianism — breaking rules you never bothered to understand is not strategy, it is vandalism with a business plan. The goal is earned deviation. Learn the practice cold. Understand exactly why it exists. And only then decide, with your eyes open, where to keep it and where to build something better.
The real question underneath all of this
In the end, this was never really an argument about practices. It is an argument about who is doing the thinking.
When you accept the default settings, you have quietly handed your judgement to whoever set the defaults — an industry, a benchmark report, a competitor you half-admire, a version of the future that was true five years ago. The companies and the leaders who have actually changed things rarely got there by accepting inherited settings. They kept asking a question the safe majority had stopped asking: does the past still deserve to decide our future?
You will not get fired for following a best practice. That is true, and it is the whole seduction of it.
But you will not build anything that matters with them either. Best practice is a floor. It keeps you from falling below the industry. It was never designed to lift you above it — and it never will.
Bringing out the better in you
This is the work I care most about at Blue Mango Consulting Group — and, frankly, it is why we exist.
Most advice hands you a best-practice playbook and calls it strategy. But a playbook that any of your competitors could pick up and run is not your strategy — it is the industry’s. Handing you the standard answer is the easiest, most blame-proof thing a consultant can do. It is also the least valuable, because it makes you more like everyone else at the precise moment you are paying to become less like them.
Our job is the harder one: to help you find your better. We start by learning the practices in your domain properly — not to worship them, but to understand them well enough to know exactly which ones are table stakes to adopt, which to adapt to your reality, and which to walk away from in favour of something built for you. Through frameworks like STRATEX360™ and BMCGCX360™, we work with founders and CXOs to interrogate inherited wisdom, pressure-test it against their actual circumstances and ecosystem, and design an execution that is genuinely, defensibly theirs.
The transformation we care about most is a simple one to name and a hard one to live: helping an owner-operator become an owner-strategist. The operator runs the business well by following the playbook. The strategist decides which parts of the playbook deserve to survive contact with the future — and where the firm will make its own. One keeps you safe. The other makes you matter.
Safe is available everywhere, for free. Better has to be built.
If you would rather stand out than blend in, that is exactly the work we do.
Kirtiraj Gohil is the Founder and Director of Blue Mango Consulting Group, an IMCI-accredited management consultancy and business coaching firm. He writes on strategy, execution and the businesses shaping India and beyond.
First published on Substack.