The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And the path to mediocrity is littered with best practices.
Paul Orfalea founded Kinko’s in 1970 near UC Santa Barbara. He expanded up the west coast, scouting out locations near large colleges.
Palo Alto, Eugene, Corvallis, Seattle.
Berkeley already had a lot of print shops, so he skipped it initially.
Once the west was dotted with Kinko’s, he started moving east.
Orfalea would spend three weeks at a time visiting stores, meeting with employees, and learning about local operations. Each location was operating with autonomy, allowing for experimentation and variance from one shop to the next. Orfalea would visit a store in Fort Lauderdale and pick up ideas he could share with Fort Worth. He’d learn a trick in Tempe that he could deliver to Tulsa. He said, “My job was to get out and see what people were doing right. And exploit it.”
Orfalea was using a light touch that allowed employees to make meaningful contributions rather than simply following the script. He didn’t ask each new store to be a cookie cutter of the last, he asked them to understand the operation, the mission, and work to providing the best possible service to customers. He would share what was working, but he didn’t force it down their throats.
Team structure, workflows, operations, and products were all getting meaningful contributions from the field.
Why did they open their first 24×7 store in Chicago? Customers were banging on the windows after hours. The employees let them in instead of turning off the lights and pulling the shades.
Occasionally, he would be asked about his unwillingness to mandate the best practices. Why didn’t he make every store look and act the same?
Orfalea said, “because if I do that, this will be the best it ever is.”
The problem with mandating a best practice is that compliance is the killer of creativity. And if you want continuous improvement and growth, you don’t manage to a checklist, you manage to a mission.
A competency trap is a false belief that your past principles, ideas, and mental models, will continually lead to future success. It’s a tendency to rely on familiar tools, skills, or routines, without measuring their effectiveness now and in the future.
Orfalea didn’t know it, but he was avoiding a competency trap.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it might not be the sage advice we think it is.
What do John, Adam, and Jeff think?
John F. Kennedy said, “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” Although it’s more common to get caught up in the way you’ve always done it, and not realize the world has changed around you.
Consider all the best practices before COVID-19. At my office, we still used dry-erase boards for parts of our coordination and communication. Weeks into the pandemic, people were doing Zoom meetings from the office, the camera pointed at those damn dry-erase boards. Best practices can be hard to kill, even when they aren’t the best anymore.
Adam Grant says, “The moment that you call a practice ‘best,’ you create an illusion that you’re done.”
And Paul Orfalea didn’t want to be done. He was just getting started.
By 1990, Kinko’s had 480 stores but something else was bubbling up from the field. The customer mix was changing from students and faculty to businesses.
They made a pivot, the new focus would not be colleges, it would be small businesses.
The world had changed around them, and they needed to change with it.
The new strategy helped them expand further. By 1997 they had 850 stores. Catering to businesses, they added other services like high-speed internet, computers, and video conferencing. I used those computers many times. Swipe your card and pay by the minute. Surfing the web would be an expensive hobby at those rates, but if you had something to print, sign, scan, and send, it was an ideal service.
Those offerings would not have come from managing to best practices. It’s not as simple as finding a recipe that works and managing it. If they ran the operation that way, Kinko’s would have kept cranking out five-cent black and white copies, and they would have died off just like Kodak, and Blockbuster.
“The process is not the thing,” Jeff Bezos wrote. Saying, “there’s a tendency to manage to proxies, a common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing.”
In a vacuum, the process that has worked in the past will continue to work. But the world is a dynamic place.
One of my early managers would say, “let’s look under the hood,” if the process was not yielding the desired results. What he meant was, let’s get past the proxy and look at the work.
We should always be looking under the hood. Processes and best practices have an expiration date.
Enter Wim Hof, killer of best practices:
Colds are caught by a virus, and you are more likely to catch it while close to people in a warm indoor environment. That is why they spread in winter. It has nothing to do with being outside in the cold. The opposite is true. Still, the best practice for generations has been to “bundle up, so you don’t catch a cold.”
When someone like Wim Hof comes around with a different idea, deep breathing and cold immersion, people say he is crazy. And he might be crazy, but he has not had a cold in 73 years. It’s true, look it up.
Best practices assume that the world is static, and improvement is not required. Even more risky is that the process is degrading over time.
Boy Band Best Practices:
Picture it. The year is 1998 and you are writing up the best practices for creating a successful music group.
At the time, you couldn’t do much better than 4-5 suburban white dudes with a few years of choir under their belt.
Enter, the Backstreet Boys.
Wait, are you kidding me? That’s what you come up with? Man, that is way off.
NSYNC?
I mean. I’m not a fan or anything but I do like that one song.
And then, of course, 98 Degrees.
Wait, wtf? The Jessica Simpson guy? Come on.
But this is what happens when you try to operate from best practices alone.
4-5 suburban white dudes with a few years of choir under their belt.
Check.
Best practice established, process managed, process followed, 98 Degrees released to the world.
Manage things by proxy and proclaim, “I followed the process.”
The process is not the thing.
A practice can be a wonderful way to navigate the world, but maybe we should start calling them current practices. Whatever you call them, just don’t go rolling out and managing to a best practice. Because if you do, it might be the best things will ever get.
