Next Practices

04/08/2010

All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.
Sydney Lumet

In his article, "Best Practices Get You Only So Far," in the Harvard Business Review (April 2010), C.K. Prahalad observes...

"Companies identify best practices, particularly those of market leaders, and try to implement them. Such benchmarking has a role to play in business, but I'm not exactly a fan of the process. It may allow enterprises to catch up with competitors, but it won't turn them into market leaders. Organizations become winners by spotting big opportunities and inventing next practices....

"Next practices are all about innovation: imagining what the future will look like; identifying the mega opportunities that will arise; and building capabilities to capitalize on them....

"If you look for ways to develop next practices, opportunities abound. In fact, executives are constrained not by resources but by their imagination."

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