A good idea is a good idea -- even if it comes from someone else.
Inc. case study
A 25-employee company, fittingly called Best Practices, routinely plunders big-company ideas and prunes them for its own use. Its methods for doing so are yours for the taking, too
The case
Ideas. Strategies. Statistics. Given the explosion in business information that's taken place over the past decade, you should have no trouble finding them. But you don't need us to tell you that the abundance of sources of business ideas hasn't made finding practical ideas any easier. And what's the point of combing through business books, magazines, case studies -- this very article -- if you can't implement your findings at your own company? But a few folks have mastered the fine art of filtering useful wisdom out of oceans of hype. Led by CEO Chris Bogan, the staff at the appropriately labeled Best Practices LLC (BP), a benchmarking group-cum-consultancy in Chapel Hill, N.C., has been spotting -- and swiping -- fruitful best practices since 1992. BP efficiently implements and monitors the results of the new ideas, too. How the company does all that is a practical strategy in itself.
Scene of the Crime
Chris Bogan had spent one summer day in a Chicago suburb interviewing the top managers of a major pharmaceutical company. Most of the sessions had taken 90 minutes. Then, in the late afternoon, he sat down with a regional sales manager. That interview lasted twice as long as the others. "I remember thinking, 'Wow. This fellow is a great manager. If he were playing baseball, he'd be a .600 hitter," Bogan says.
What mesmerized Bogan was the manager's technique for launching a new product. The manager's sales squad covered a small midwestern region, yet it had consistently outsold teams in much bigger urban markets. Though the comparative performance of his team was singularly impressive, the manager's success in product introduction dazzled Bogan. This was the pharmaceutical industry, after all, where swarms of sales reps compete for doctors' attention. Yet the manager had found a way to jump-start new-product sales. By using market research that recorded daily drug sales, he tracked where in his district the first few prescriptions for any new drug had been written. For each prescription, he made a phone call to the rep who had made the sale to ask what had sold the doctor on the drug. Then the manager sent out a global voice-mail message to all the other district sales reps to share with them the successful sales pitch.
Soon after the interview, Bogan realized that the pharmaceutical manager's insights could help his company launch its new database product. The offering was BP's fourth and newest line; the other three were online benchmarking reports, membership services, and research and consulting projects.
The company's consulting clients were typically Fortune 500 businesses looking to improve performance in operational areas like customer service or sales and marketing. Over time BP had developed a Rolodex of more than 30,000 large-company contacts that it could survey in search of examples of excellence in those areas. After sharing its findings with its consulting clients, BP would leverage the information by selling it through, say, another product line such as online benchmarking reports with titles like Managing World-Class Call Centers: Site Visit Findings. And now, with the database product, BP hoped to sell customers on the concept of buying unlimited Internet access to BP's archives.
Initially, BP saw database access as a tool for middle managers who wanted to understand performance excellence in their areas of responsibility. But when BP followed the regional manager's strategy of quickly examining where sales came from and why, the company learned that, in fact, database access was often purchased by managers looking to brief senior executives on certain subjects. "We had never positioned it as a briefing tool," recalls Bogan. The company retargeted its marketing efforts. Database-access revenues grew 40% within a month -- all because Bogan had stolen, adapted, and executed the regional sales manager's idea.
Business-school brains would call such idea theft "the transfer of a best practice" -- and testify that such transfers often fail because of change-resistant employees and disorganized managers. "Sometimes you can create a trauma within an organization by forcing people to do things a different way. Employees then resist future changes because of what they were forced to deal with the last time," says Gabriel Szulanski, a Wharton professor. A study last year by Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer corroborates Szulanski's point: it found that few companies manage corporate transformations as well as they would like and that about 70% of all change initiatives fail.
Yet incorporating new initiatives is all but de rigueur for Bogan's business. Granted, a company of 25 should not have the hardest time breaking habits and forming new ones. But smallness raises other hurdles. How do you downscale a big-company idea to solve a small company's problems? How do you implement and monitor the idea without springing for new employees or expensive technology? So often has BP answered those questions that its methods for adapting borrowed strategies have become institutional procedures. Its own best practice may be the informal system it's developed for copying the best practices of others. Here are the three steps the company follows.
Step One: Gathering Ideas
BP gathers ideas in three ways. The first method, what Bogan calls a "lessons-learned review," pushes employees to collect ideas from projects and the company's everyday activities. Those activities might include conducting a survey for a consulting project, planning the agenda for a conference, or drafting and editing a report.
Most employees work on both product and internal project teams. Upon completion of a project, each team conducts a "debrief," a meeting at which teammates review the effort's highs and lows. Teams devote part of the debriefing to the lessons-learned review, discussing ideas encountered during the project that could, if implemented, improve life at Best Practices.
Small lessons often are acted on quickly. Early last year some members of the benchmarking-reports team were debriefed after doing studies with Motorola and FedEx. In the surveys, employees said that they wanted their companies to recognize their successes as a group rather than as individuals. That finding raised concerns on the BP team about the company's sales bell. The bell, which a team member was supposed to ring with pride following his or her sale of a report, actually annoyed most employees, who disliked its emphasis on individual selling and the internal competitiveness such an emphasis spawned. Seeing a parallel in the Motorola and FedEx situations, the team -- now with firm grounds to protest -- finally spoke up about the bell, leading to the development of a group-recognition method, a whiteboard that showed both individual and group sales.
